DC problem after tools/hardward upgrade - urgent

[Kahonu]

Aloha,

I did the VMWare Tools/Hardware upgrade the first of two domain controllers. Now I cannot login. There is no option to login locally. I can ping short name but not FQN. The second domain controller is logged in from a week ago and has not been upgraded yet. If I go into AD Users and Computers on that machine, I can see users etc.. I cannot ping the not upgraded DC by FQN either.

Please help

Bill

[DSTAVERT]

You can't log in via the vSphere Client console? You may have just lost network connectivity. You may just need to reconfigure the OS nic settings IP etc.

[Kahonu]

I can - ESX/VCenter is not part of the domain. I can't login to the DC VM itself. It appears the domain itself is gone/inaccessable.

[Troy_Clavell]

not that this will help for this particular scenario, but maybe in the future.  With very important guests we usually will snapshot the guest prior to the vHardware upgrade.  This way if something doesn't go as planned we can revert back.  You can also do this prior to the tools upgrade as well, or just snapshot the guest then do the tools upgrade, if all goes good move onto the hardware...

[Kahonu]

I have a Ranger backup. But why isn't DC2 taking over??

[Kahonu]

From the summary tab, I see that the IP changed.

[DSTAVERT]

vSphere client log into the ESX(i) host directly. Can you log into the DC console from there. Restart and use Domain Recovery mode -- it becomes a local login. See if you can reset the IP etc.

[Kahonu]

Can't login to DC VM period.

[DSTAVERT]

From a restart and choosing Active Directory Recovery? The password will / should be different than the domain administrator password.

[Kahonu]

I got in via Recovery Mode. Changed IP. Correct IP now shows on Summary tab. However still cannot log in.

[Rumple]

thats something bigger then IP changing.  I'd have to take a guess that the AD is corrupt.  If this is a windows 2008 VM have you gone into the disk manager and made sure all disks are online.

Upgrading tools (or hardware) on a Windows 2008 Enterprise machine can  cause the secondary disks to start up offline (search google for SAN policy).

I'd almost syspect your AD database files were on a secondary disk thats marked offline still,

[DSTAVERT]

I would agree with Rumple. I would start doing some AD discovery --event logs etc. If the second AD machine isn't responding appropriately you want to find the last time things were working on that machine. Any time I need to do AD recovery I usually try to restore domain controllers to a contained environment --no access to production -- and work on them -- practice -- there.