Removing VM from a host in maintenance mode

[Byron_Zhao]

Need to put a ESX 3.0.1 host into maintenance mode for some hardware repair. I want to move one VM to another host and power it on. But now I am having problems with taking it off inventory from thae maintained host. Anyone knows a work around for this?

Appreciate any help.

-BZ

[esiebert7625]

What type of problem are you having, are you getting an error? Are you trying to do a Migrate through VC or are you trying to remove it from the inventory and then copy it with SCP to another host?

You can use vmware-cmd -s unregister to manually un-register a VM from the Service Console

[Byron_Zhao]

Maybe I didn't make my problem clear enough.

When a ESX host is in maintenance mode, most of the menu options in VC are grey out for the VMs that are in this host. No migration, no remove from inventory. Since I can't do anything, I am not getting any error in VC.

From the service console, when I ran vmware-cmd -s unregister , it returned this:

VMControl error -999: Unknown error: SoapError: ServerFaultCode(1520) : (vim.fault.InvalidState)

Three power off VMs are still in this ESX host, and now i want to move one VM from this host to another on and power it on. I guess I have to put this host out of maintenance mode, migrate the VM off the host, and put this host back into maintenance mode. Well, I still wonder if there are any other work around.

-BZ

[esiebert7625]

Ah, you had said you needed to put the host in maintenance mode so I wasn't sure if you had yet or not. You could probably just copy the VM's files to another server using SCP since the VM is not running and then just register the host on the other server. As long as you do not have a Autostart on the source server which will try and start the original VM, you obviously don't want two VM's running at once. When you power the VM up on the new server you will receive a message that the location of the configuration file has changed. Select Keep and click OK. After the original server is back up you can un-register the VM and delete the files.

Of course it will probably be much easier to take the server out of MM and do a cold migrate.

[bister]

Right, you cannot do any migration and power-operations on VMs when the host is in maintenance mode. Exit maintenance mode, migrate the VM and then go into maintenance mode again will be the easiest way to do it.

[Byron_Zhao]

I knew I could do it this way. But still wonder if there are any other ways to do it. Anyway, thanks.

[hicksj]

If the VM is on shared storage, could you (on a running host) browse out to that storage, select the vm.vmx file and add it to that host's inventory? Note: It may add it as "VM(1)", but that isn't any problem.

When the other system is restored, it will not be able to power on the VM because the other has it locked - so you won't have a problem. This would be preferrable to cloning the VM... I would think. Then you just remove the duplicate VM entry from the original host's inventory.

Regards,

J

Message was edited by:

hicksj

[jdvcp]

Just move the host in maintenance mode out of the cluster. Take it out of maintenance mode (and no VMs from the original cluster will migrate to it, etc or throw off available host numbers etc). At that point, do a migrate of the VM.

This all assumes shared storage, etc.