Trying to migrate vm to another san...cannot find *.vmdk

[ksuchewie]

I am trying to move one of my vm's from my old san onto a new one. When I try to do the migration, I get error messages stating in cannot find the files. Whenever I WINscp into the san and look for the files they are there. So far this is my only vm to give me this error out of 20 vm's. Anyone seen this problem before?

ESX 3.5.1, VC 2.5.1, EMC AX150 (moving to EMC AX4)

[williamarrata]

From your VC, click on the host, Look at your summary tab and you'll see the datastore you are connected to. Right click your datastore and Brouse Datastore. Here you should see the folder of the VM you created. Double click the folder you are looking for and in the right frame you'll see files. What you want to do here is, right click on the VMX file and Add to inventory. Follow the steps and this will reinstall the vm to the host.

Hope that helped.

[williamarrata]

One more thing, Click on the Configuration tab, click on Storage Adapters and make sure that you see your HBA's are seeing both LUNS. What I mean by that is, one HBA should see one LUN and the other HBA should see the other.

Hope that helped.

[ksuchewie]

my host is listed as "cameras" in my inventory. When I goto my datastore, the folder is "cameras", but all of the files are listed as "HSSH-cameras.*"

I'm guessing the person who set these all up remaned this vm in the inventory after it was created. If I try to re-add it to the inventory it says the vm already exists.

[williamarrata]

Try the following commands

service mgmt-vmware restart

then

service vmware-vpxa restart

Lets see if that resets the VM's.

Hope that helped.

[ksuchewie]

where do I enter those commands?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You'll enter those commands at the console of the ESX host having the problem. Note that if you have VMs set to automatically start and you're not patched up to March 10th, then the first command will cause those VMs to restart.

[ksuchewie]

I tried those commands and I'm still getting the error message...

a file was not found. cameras/HSSH-Cameras.vmdk

but if I winscp to that location the file is there...

[ksuchewie]

I am going to duplicate the file onto the new san. rename the old vm to HSSH-cameras, and rename all th new file to cameras and add it to inventory. I'll report back after that.

[ksuchewie]

My file copy over the night failed. I guess it did not like copying 100gig worth of data at once. I am breaking up the copy process to seperate the bigger vmdk files.

[espi3030]

Maybe during some scheduled maintenance time you can re-boot the VC server. Also, now that you are trying to copy the files off... Here is a backup script that I use maybe you can use this to backup the VM in question over to the new SAN.

[ksuchewie]

Speaking of backups, what is the recommended way to back vm servers? Create snapshots? Install a backup client (i.e. veritas) and backup to disk/tape?

[espi3030]

My environment is still in the begening stages. For now I use that script to backup all my VM's over to our SAN, at that point our SAN guys are responcible for the backup unfortunately I do not know their procedures. This way has worked for me on a couple of restorations so far.

[ksuchewie]

I finally got it to start migrating via VC.

1. Restart VC

2. Remove VM from inventory

3. Browse via winscp current datastore and rename folder/files to HSSH-Cameras (instead of cameras)

4. Browse datastore via VC and add VM back to inventory. Use the old name (HSSH-Cameras)

5. Migrate