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cycloxr
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Recovering ESXi Datastorage and VM Hosts after hardware failure

Hello,

We had a Dell R610 which had a VMWare ESXi 6.5u1 host running on a Raid 5 configuration.  Unfortunately the R610 this was on died and we had to replace with a new system.   I am in the process of trying to recover some of the data so I can migrate it over to the new system but am having some issues.  I pulled the old drives and placed into another R610 with the hope that I could just power up and begin pulling data from the VM Hosts.   I'm able to load up VMWare ESXi and log into the vSphere web client but the VM is not loading properly and the datastore is also not mounting although I do see the device and partitions.   Is there a way to mount that existing datastore so I can load the VM from it? I only see a way to create a fully new datastore (deleting the old one) or extending it.

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continuum
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Hello
first of all check wether the datastore is detected as a snapshot.
See VMware Knowledge Base
If that does not help to mount the datastore I would suggest to create a VMFS-header-dump as I describe here:
Create a VMFS-Header-dump using an ESXi-Host in production | VM-Sickbay
With such a dump I can tell you wether there is a chance to recover the VMs manually.
Ulli


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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continuum
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Hello
first of all check wether the datastore is detected as a snapshot.
See VMware Knowledge Base
If that does not help to mount the datastore I would suggest to create a VMFS-header-dump as I describe here:
Create a VMFS-Header-dump using an ESXi-Host in production | VM-Sickbay
With such a dump I can tell you wether there is a chance to recover the VMs manually.
Ulli


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

IRIX201110141
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You have to enter the PERC menu and import the foreign RAID config from the drives assumed the drives are healthy.

Regards

Joerg

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cycloxr
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this worked! Thank you.

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