One ESXI Host is Down Need Plan to Recover

[insearchof]

ESXI 6.5

I have 8 ESXI 6.5 hosts running several VM's

Last night I lost power and after the UPS's went off all my hosts went down.

6 of the 8 are now back up.

The start up off an external USB drive. Which is where I  installed ESXI on

The one host will not start with this error

Error Loading /s.v000

Compressed MD5 699..............

Decompressed MD5 00000....................

Fatal Error 33 inconsistent data

Can I just reinstall ESXI on another USB without loosing my Data Stores ?  This host has 2 internal Data stores

What is the procedure to recover this issue?

Any one have a plan of attack?

Any way to move those VM's off ?

Need help

Thanks

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

The error message you're seeing usually means the boot media is corrupt (failed USB drive...was it a cheapo?). You should be able to get new media and re-install ESXi and it'll detect the VMFS datastore (if local) it already had. Let this be a valuable lesson to NOT USE LOCAL DATASTORES.

[insearchof]

Thanks

This is a network I run in my home My management (me) will not allow purchase of SAN LOL

That is why I installed on USB to boot ESXI from.

Yes I got the free from work place  need to go get a replacement now.

Thanks again

[daphnissov]

Booting from USB is fine and is widely done regardless of the state of one's storage, but external storage is almost a must. NAS devices are not expensive these days and mitigate against these types of outages you just experienced. However, that doesn't negate the need for proper backups...even in a home lab.

[insearchof]

I will look into getting a NAS Device which I can share the storage across all ESXI Hosts.

Do you have any you would recommend?

[daphnissov]

Synology

[insearchof]

I have some sinology NAS devices also blackArmor by Seagate.

I have two setup as NFS Storage on my ESXi Hosts.

Is there a better why to connect the NAS to ESXI 

[daphnissov]

Is there a better way? Not sure what you mean. You can either use NFS or iSCSI. "Better" depends on your conditions and goals, so we'd have no idea what that would be in your case.

[insearchof]

I just reinstalled ESXI 6.5

I can not see any of the data stores that where there originally

How to I get them back?