Need help from host crash

[hdhjclark]

I am about to write a novel so I apologize. 

I came in this morning to PSOD on a ESXi host. 1 of 5 hosts connected to a VCenter server in a cluster. 6 machines were down an non-responsive so VMotion did not save me. I rebooted the host and found that it had some how reverted to ESXi 6.0.0 which I havent' used in years. Long story short on that, I believe a HPE dual 8GB MicroSD usb stick inside, for the boot drive, had failed me for a long time. I had a new spare and I swapped that in and got the host back online fairly quickly. I opened a support case during that time because I was pretty scared. The host is back online, the datastore is showing in the local VSphere. What I am unsure of is how to proceed. Do I attempt to reconnect the host in VCenter? Will that work? I think it will be seen as a new host and not "reconnect". So do I remove the old entry for the host and then add the newly rebuilt host as a new host? Once that is complete, is the correct step to simply import the machines that are in that host's store?

Support has abandoned me for hours and I need to get these machines back online. Does anyone have any advice?

[hdhjclark]

I haven't pulled the trigger yet but I wanted to check how far I could get with a reconnect. As soon as I start the reconnect dialog I get an event stating, Authenticity of the host's SSL certificate is not verified. So, I think i am correct, I need to remove this one and then add the newly rebuilt host. 

[hdhjclark]

I went ahead and tried it and it appears to have reconnected. It is configuring vSphere HA.... crossing fingers. 

[hdhjclark]

So far so good. 

[hdhjclark]

So just in case anyone else finds themselves in the pickle I was in...

1) Your newly rebuilt Host can reconnect. You will get prompted for the thumbprint/cert when you reconnect.

2) Once it is reconnected, your machines on that host are not going to revive on their own. You need to remove the "orphaned" entries from VCenter and then re-register them from the your problem host's datastore. 

3) You will need to rebuild your networking. vlans, port assignments etc.. 

4) If you had central storage, as well, you will need to rebuild that. I had iSCSI that needed to be rebuilt. Luckily I had a nice list of IPs from when I built it originally.