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haimbeyhan
Contributor
Contributor

Virtual machine state inaccessible after upgrade 5.1

We were using ESXi 4.1 u2 standard with Vcenter Standard.

Last week I converted the physical Vcenter server to virtual and all ran fine

then I upgraded the Vcenter 4.1 to 5.1 and then all the esxi hosts one by one and installed the lates patches.

My problem is, after the upgarde, I started seeing some virtual machines are shown in italic font and "inaccessible" next to them. There is no correlation between those vm's. I unregistered and then registered again through data browser and they showed regular. After a while the same problem with other vm's and/or same vm's. Then I unregistered again all of them, deleted all kind of .nvram .lck .vswp files that were as I thought may be those files are disturbing somehow and then registered again. Today I started seeing couple of more machines that are "inaccessible".

The strange thing is, I see the problem only on powered off machines. Powered on vm's go on running without problem.

I don't understand what is causing this problem.

Anyone can help ?

Thanks,

Haim Beyhan

IT Manager

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Sreejesh_D
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

1. can you check the storage status at the time the VM went inaccessible. The datastore might have disconnected for a while and came back.

2. Instead of re-registering the VMs you can just re-load it.

this command from CLI will give you the Name and VMID of the VMs which are inaccessible.

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms | grep skip

Skipping invalid VM '118'

this will reload the VM which is not accessible

vim-cmd vmsvc/reload [NUMBER]

eg: vim-cmd vmsvc/reload 118

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haimbeyhan
Contributor
Contributor

I checked the vmkernel.log and I saw that the ESXi lost connection to datastore.

After some research, I found out a problem with ESXi 5.X with Netapp storage in which I have to change an Advanced Setting.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=201612...

I did now this setting and rebooted the server. I hope this will fix it.

Regarding the commandline for loading inaccessible machines, it worked.

Thanks,

Haim Beyhan

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Sreejesh_D
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

good luck.

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