davecon's Posts

Thanks for your help. In the end i managed to cleanly shut down the vm and quickly restart it on another host. Now i have to find out why my host failed and disconnected. I will try and get more... See more...
Thanks for your help. In the end i managed to cleanly shut down the vm and quickly restart it on another host. Now i have to find out why my host failed and disconnected. I will try and get more use out of the commands, which admittedly i dont like to mess with them at the moment! Points awarded for the help. thanks
I have tried to re-add the VM to the inventory under a different name, but it fails with an error saying the 'the specified key name, or identifier already exists'? the original VM is sti... See more...
I have tried to re-add the VM to the inventory under a different name, but it fails with an error saying the 'the specified key name, or identifier already exists'? the original VM is still listed in the VC and is running, but is listed as disconnected. Again, any help is appreciated! thanks
Thanks for the replies.. I will try this tomorow and let you know how i get on.
Hi Thanks for the quick replies. If i try to see teh ESX host from Winscp or Veeam Fastscp it just times out - it cannot connect. In the datastore browser i can only Delete the VM or add to i... See more...
Hi Thanks for the quick replies. If i try to see teh ESX host from Winscp or Veeam Fastscp it just times out - it cannot connect. In the datastore browser i can only Delete the VM or add to inventory - but will that do a shutdown or a vmotion on the vm? thanks
HI Hopefully someone can help me out on this one.... I have a HA cluster of 7 ESX 3.02 hosts. 1 x vm per host, all running in production environment (24x7). One of my hosts (ESX07) has lost ... See more...
HI Hopefully someone can help me out on this one.... I have a HA cluster of 7 ESX 3.02 hosts. 1 x vm per host, all running in production environment (24x7). One of my hosts (ESX07) has lost connection to VC. (appears as disconnected). I have tried disconnecting but VC returns an error "unable to acces the specified host". I can ping the ESX and i get full reply.However i cannot ssh/putty into it. I have also tried to login at the console but the login prompt does not accept a password - it just sits at login! I would just reboot the box, but i have a VM running on it which i cannont shutdown. At the moment the VM is still running fine, as has been for over a week!. It would seem the Host is hung somehow, but i have no way of doing a mgmt-restart or i cannot migrate off the VM as the VC will not allow it while host is disconnected. I have also tried to access the ESX host webpage but that is not working also. Basically i need to know - Is there any other way i can vmotion the VM onto another box, while the Host is disconnected from Virtual Centre? At this stage i am thinking my only solution is to rdp into the VM and do a clean shutdown, and then power it up on another host. Any suggestions? Many thanks for any help Dave
Thank you Just regarding the Startup/Shutdown settings... I will set VM to automatic startup. In the 'Shutdown Action' option - what is the difference between 'Guest Shutdown' and 'Power off'. ... See more...
Thank you Just regarding the Startup/Shutdown settings... I will set VM to automatic startup. In the 'Shutdown Action' option - what is the difference between 'Guest Shutdown' and 'Power off'. I assume 'guest shutdown' will cleanly shutdown the VM from within windows, and Power off will force a shutdown? What happens if the VM (windows 2k3) hangs or fails to shutdown, will the host force it down? Is the 'shutdown delay' the wait time for the VM shut down? Apologies for all the questions- I am just trying to get a better understanding of all the options (difficult without being able to 'play' with settings in a production environment!) thanks again.
Thanks I didnt want to go and remove it in case their was a simpler way of reconnecting that i was missing!! Thanks for that, at least i can just do that if it fails again.
Hi I have a question regarding UPS shutdown and HA on ESX 3.02 We have 6 ESX hosts, all running Production VM's from a SAN. The system is powered through an APC Symmetra unit. I have man... See more...
Hi I have a question regarding UPS shutdown and HA on ESX 3.02 We have 6 ESX hosts, all running Production VM's from a SAN. The system is powered through an APC Symmetra unit. I have managed to Install APC's Powerchute network shutdown on all ESX host and it seems to be running fine. At the moment i cannot fully test UPS shutdowns as the system is in use. I will be able to test and run through shutdown/power failure scenarios in the next few weeks, but i would like to know if anyone has set this up and what solutions you have used? If I set each host to shutdown using PCNS, will the HA start migrating VM's if one host shuts down faster than another? This could get very messy if the hosts shutdown at different times. In this case, would i be better off using the Powerchute software inside each VM, and then waiting for all VM's to go down before the ESX hosts are shutdown? I have seen people using scipts etc.. but I am not confident enough in Linux scripting to trust everything to work! Ideally, i would like to be able to just shutdown each host, and not have to do anything inside the VM's. In this case, the ESX host would get a shutdown signal from the UPS, then cleanly shutdown each VM and the power off the host. Has anyone set this up (and tested) without having to spend days creating and testing scripts? Any help/info would be much appreciated! Thanks.
Hi During some planned downtime today, i came across an issue which may cause problems in the future - so i am just looking for any insight... We have 6 Esx hosts running Win2k3 vm's. All ... See more...
Hi During some planned downtime today, i came across an issue which may cause problems in the future - so i am just looking for any insight... We have 6 Esx hosts running Win2k3 vm's. All VM's reside on SAN storage. HA/DRS is in use and working fine. Basically we were going through each host and shutting down VM's, then putting each host in to Maintenance mode. Each host was then restarted. One of the host servers had a 'pink screen of death' on reboot. Since this host did not come back up, its VM shows as disconnected in Virtual Center. Luckily this host came back up after a second reboot, and its VM was able to power on. During the 'pink screen'/failed host I was unable to migrate or disconnect the VM and reconnect it on another host. As the host was in maintenance mode, HA obviously wasnt able to migrate the vm to a working host. My question is - If the failed host had not come back up after a second reboot, how would i manually disconnect the VM and power it up on a working ESX host? I know this can be done using cmd line, but not sure of the proccess. I cannot really play with it as its a 24/7 production system. Obviously, i still have to find out why my server 'pink screened' but thats another days work! thanks in advance for any replies.
dmaster - thanks for your suggestion, that should work well for now. weinstein5 - thanks, thats the answer i was looking for - I knew their had to be some way of importing an existing vm from ... See more...
dmaster - thanks for your suggestion, that should work well for now. weinstein5 - thanks, thats the answer i was looking for - I knew their had to be some way of importing an existing vm from the datastore. many thanks for the quick replies and solutions, for my first post! Dave.
thanks for the quick reply. I can move the disk files, but i am wondering can i not import directly from the vmdk/vmx files in the datastore? This would avoid having to create a new vm from scrat... See more...
thanks for the quick reply. I can move the disk files, but i am wondering can i not import directly from the vmdk/vmx files in the datastore? This would avoid having to create a new vm from scratch and trying to remember what the exact hardware config was for the original vm, and also avoid having to move disk files after the creation of the vm. Apologies if this doesnt make sense! I am still only getting used to VM Thanks again.
HI Hopefully someone can help me with this one? We have 6 x ESX 3.02 servers and HP EVA 4100 SAN, all in one HA cluster. I have a Virtual machine (Win 2003 server) that was removed from V... See more...
HI Hopefully someone can help me with this one? We have 6 x ESX 3.02 servers and HP EVA 4100 SAN, all in one HA cluster. I have a Virtual machine (Win 2003 server) that was removed from Virtual center inventory by mistake, but not deleted from the SAN/Datastore. I need to re-install this VM into the HA cluster. I Can create a new VM and use the orignal disk image file, but when this is done, it creates a new folder on the datastore with a new .vmx file but the vmdk file is in the original directory. Basically i now have a vritual machine which has 2 x directories associated with it on the datastore. It works ok, but i dont like the idea having the vmdk and config files split accross 2 different directories. I hope this makes sense, and i am just wondering is there not an easier/cleaner way of re-importing a vm that was removed from the inventory?? Is using VM Converter the only option? and help would be appreciated thanks.