blackout + lost vsphere + vcenter passwords

[lkomarci]

Hi everyone,

could use a little help here. I'm working in a new environment and we just had a blackout. The passwords and ip addresses are on a network drive which I can't access as the domain controllers are offline so I can't access the vcenter or vsphere to boot the virtual machines.

Whan can I do??

Thanks in advance! I'm in quite deep

Luke

[StephenMoll]

So these are standalone hosts then, not clustered?

[lkomarci]

Yes they're standalone, no HA here.

But I'm not really an expert in this topic, the IT system is just one of my many duties here. What do you propose as an optimal solution? There are 2 ESXi hosts here, for HA 3 are recommended and I'm not sure yet how well this additional cost would be accepted but nevertheless I'd like to find a more viable solution for the current hardware.

[StephenMoll]

If your key services are resilient through other strategies, like Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), then there probably isn't much point in going for HA at the moment until you can bring another host into the equation.

[lkomarci]

Now I'm by far no expert in this field but - would you prefer WSFC over vmware fault tolerance? Is it possible to engage with any of these on a running system, i.e. without having to lose any data?

cheers

[StephenMoll]

Often you have no choice. If you are installing and relying on a 3rd party solution that is built on WSFC, then often that is what you will use. Building these into a vSphere environment is pretty well understood nowadays. Fault Tolerance was considered for some portions of our system, but it is very costly in terms of resource needs, e.g. dedicated 10gbps network for FT network traffic. Also there are limits on how many FT VMs you can have. We have dozens of WSFC components, it would not be practical to run them all as FT VMs.