VM not booting after power failure - ESXi 5.1.0

[Dricksus]

Hey everyone, first time posting here, so apologies in advance if I get some thing wrong!

we had to move into a temp office while our final office was finishing construction (still underway)...we moved all of our networking equipment into its final home, and we use VPN tunnels on a cisco ASA to get access to everything.

Recently at our final location, we had our enterprise UPS fail. This caused a custom built PC that was acting as a VM server to power off. upon powering it back on (it hosts 3 VM's: a gitolite repository, a confluence, and a redmine) the redmine is failing to come back up. I can ping it, but when I open console on it in vSphere it just says Starting up...

if I go to connect via Workstation Pro it just says, "unable to connect to the MKS: Internal error". I have restarted the management agents, removed it from the inventory and readded, but I still cannot get this to boot. Came here as a last resort to try and get this VM to boot as its crucial to our operations.

Many thanks!

EDIT: I should note, I am new at this job, I came in and we got notified we had 10 days to move, and none of this is setup ideally like I would like it to be, but the rest of the IT team quit so im just doing my best :smileysilly:

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

if you want, I can take a look at the VM's current vmware.log file, but I'm afraid that the "Starting up..." message comes from the guest OS itself, so that you'll need to find help from someone who knows redmine, or the guest OS on which it runs.

The "unable to connect to the MKS: Internal error" is likely caused by different protocol versions (SSL/TLS). ESXi 5.1 uses an old one, which may not be enabled anymore on new VMware Workstation versions.

André

[Dricksus]

if you wouldnt mind looking at the log, that would be amazing. while I am not NEW to VMWare, this feels just outside my range.

[a_p_]

Please attach the vmware.log file that you can download from the VM's folder on the datastore to your next replay.

You can find the Attach link on the lower right of the reply window.

André

[Dricksus]

Here it is! I didnt know which one to do, as there are a bunch of logs with numbers as well, so I will attach this one for now, and if you need the others I can attach them

[a_p_]

According to the log file, both, the 17GB as well as the 100GB virtual disk were opened successfully, and it indeed looks like a guest OS issue.

A quick Google search for ubuntu "Starting up" showed several results with similar issues, which my help you too.

What I'd suggest though, is that you take a Snapshot on that VM prior to troubleshooting, so that you always can revert to the current state. And don't forget to delete this snapshot again once the issue has been fixed, and the VM is up, and running again.

André

[Dricksus]

Could I just select a separate guest OS via vSphere? right now I can ping the VM, but when I go to access the redmine it doesnt load and says empty response.

[Dricksus]

Basically, I am at a point where I have NO idea how to fix this. I don't suppose there could be other info in those logs I talked about?

I browsed the datastore for the bitmine as well and there are some vmx~ and vswp files.

[a_p_]

Could I just select a separate guest OS via vSphere?

Sorry, but I don't understand this question. Can you please clarify?

André

[Dricksus]

apologies for the confusion, I already tried changing the guest OS. ive encountered another issue now where I cannot add anything to inventory. not sure why.