Bad Disk - Virtual Machine won't start

[boso77]

Hi all,

I hope this is an easy one.

I have ESXi 5.x machine with a virtual machine running Linux. There are 4 physical hard drives. One of my virtual machines has Software RAID 5 configured with one virtual disk on a different physical drive.

One of the hard disks has failed. The virtual machine now will not start as it cannot find the disk.

I am going to replace the disk, but wanted to get ideas on how to do this without losing my data. My current thinking is to replace the disk, create the missing virtual disk and fire up the machine, hoping that RAID will detect that the data is gone and rebuild the volume. I'm hoping this will work, but if anyone has any advice, I'm all ears

Thanks.

[tomtom901]

You should be able to remove the (missing) VMDK from the VM and start the VM. The software R5 should then go in a degraded state and you can make a backup just for safety. Then indeed you should swap the dead physical disk, and add the new VMDK to the VM. You should then start a rebuild.

You can view software RAID info in Linux via:

cat /proc/mdstat

For the rest of the rebuild process, I recommend reading:

Replacing A Failed Hard Drive In A Software RAID1 Array | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

Which is for a RAID-1 array, but it should work the same.

[EMILY32]

Hi

Welcome to the communities.

If you have RADI 5 then there is very less chance to data loss until unless two hard disk got failed.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.