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ssSFrankSss
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I have lost my vSAN. Could you help?

Is there somebody who can help me retrieve my vSAN setup?

That day was sooo bad, I was making bad decisions one after the other. I can not believe my self. Literally I can not believe myself Smiley Sad

Let you describe my set up briefly: 3 nodes Dell r720xd, with 3 SSDs each. vCenter run in vSAN.

1) I loose my UPS an APC. I send it to be fixed, meanwhile I used an old one with kink of old batteries. They have never returned this to me. So I leave the old one.

- I never change it. I say OK it works for some minutes we are fine.

2)  I loose one SSD the system works fine.

- I say OK it works, I am too busy lets do something else.

Now the things go reallyyyy bad! That day arrives and due to strong winds we had power outages in the night. I am arriving at the place in the morning. I could not locate any VMs. I say OK lets look maybe I have to turn them on. I log in to ESXi. It seems vCenter was not working I tried to restart the server from ESXi the Task was loading for ever. And I could not open any VM or do anything.

so...

3) I am restarting simultaneously the three servers. (It is bad I know, don't ask me why I did that) After that restart, every VM was appearing as Status: "Invalid". But I could see the vSAN. I could not register any VM at that point since when I was opening the explorer I could not see any files. At that time I could see the capacity of vSAN.

4) I said OK let me close them one by one. Open them get the dust out because from the years they had much dust, and then see if something is going to be fixed! I opened them cleared them carefully but  now one out of three servers didn't want to open at all! LOL it went from bad to worse. At this point vSAN was appearing as 0 from the other two servers!

5) I was so sad and mad and without clear mind I say ok lets retrieve from an older back up. And lets make everything from beginning. So out of the 2 running servers I am exiting one server from vSAN cluster and try to erase the one disk in order to start making from the top everything. At that point I remember that I have some really important files that I have not backed up.

Long story short I have one server that can not be turned on (I have tried to change power supplies no luck). And one out of the two working servers with one erased SSD (out of 3 SSDs) and removed also from the vSAN cluster.

Since I have some really important files which I want to retrieve. I would appreciate if somebody could help me with this situation.

I think even the God will find this difficult. Or maybe a real vSAN and server expert could help me. I am really sad with my bad decisions. I do not have any support at this time. So I would be glad to discuss a payment in PM if somebody could help me!

Thank you in advance,

Frank

22 Replies
ssSFrankSss
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I am not sure how to express my feelings! God bless you!!! You saved a life from somewhere in the world (Crete). I could not think that it could ever work from that initial situation!

Thank you everybody!

I wish the very best to you and all VMware team for bringing such awesome software alive!

:smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin::smileygrin:

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depping
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This is awesome to hear Frank!

But please, please... Backup everything ASAP! Also, please have the discussion around a support contract, as in situations like these you don't want to be dependent on the help of random people on the VMware communities.

Hope you enjoy the rest of the week.

TheBobkin
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Hello Frank,

Glad to hear you got your data back and happy that we could help get you there.

But please as Duncan said, if you are running/storing anything that you even remotely care about then ensure you have a robust back-up plan in place for situations like this where the importance of the data is only realised after disks/hosts are wiped etc. .

Bob