Desertsweeper Tracker

My Products Empty

Desertsweeper — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 02:34:25 GMT

Honest Statement: The VMWare website and portals confuse the hell out of me. I have been a small-time customer for many years and getting to your product is never an easy task. So now we have this "Customer Connect" and when I go there - the "My products" is empty. I open a ticket asking why my years of purchases are gone and I get a response that now I am authorised...but still empty. Why do I need to be authorised for what i have paid for? And why are all my products gone? Truly bizarre way of doing things

Re: OVF deployment problems after upgrading to 6.5

Desertsweeper — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 19:48:56 GMT

OP: "Recently I upgraded from vSphere 6 to 6.5 and that comes of course with the pain point made mandatory - the web client."

I too landed up here looking for help with this. I just moved from ESXi 5.5 to 6.5 and discovered the pain of the web-client. This is Deja Vu...when MS unleashed Windows 8 on the world. I mean seriously - what is wrong with the simplicity and elegance of the the old vSphere client? It worked and it worked well. Everything was where it should be, and it is responsive and dedicated to the job at hand. But most importantly, it was intuitive. This new web story is everything but. It is lethargic, counter-intuitive and totally unnecessary. Change for the sake of change, not improvement. big thumbs down.

Oh and I just got this: "Unhandled exception (1). Unfortunately, we hit an error that we weren't expecting. The client blah blah"

The point is that the management system is now at the mercy of the browser...so you get all kinds of problems. IE won't upload a file larger than 4GB. Chrome has other issues. Firefox seems best...but hey the DEDICATED CLIENT was just that: DEDICATED.

Re: Data recovery - can I clone an entire ESXi Datastore?

Desertsweeper — Thu, 19 May 2016 20:02:17 GMT

Hi continuum, is it too late to call you?

Re: Data recovery - can I clone an entire ESXi Datastore?

Desertsweeper — Wed, 18 May 2016 21:12:00 GMT

I only just saw your advice on the misconfigured vmx file and to stop using the outdated VM. Unfortunately the users have been churning away for the last few days...

Re: Data recovery - can I clone an entire ESXi Datastore?

Desertsweeper — Wed, 18 May 2016 21:01:30 GMT

Thank you for your continued assistance continuum. Here is what is in the VM Folder:

There are two volumes, ServerDXB2.vmdk and ServerDXB2_1.vmdk

Re: Data recovery - can I clone an entire ESXi Datastore?

Desertsweeper — Tue, 17 May 2016 14:03:19 GMT

Hi continuum, thank you for responding.

Cloning the raw device would mean booting the server off a cloning application disk right? Then copying the raw disks to an attached drive or across a network. Something like Acronis? But what recognises the VMware partition system?

What sort of details would you like? It is as though the VM rolled itself back to the 2nd of may, 10 days prior to the issue.

Data recovery - can I clone an entire ESXi Datastore?

Desertsweeper — Tue, 17 May 2016 07:33:42 GMT

So I restarted a host ESXi 5.1 server (after backing up the VM with Windows Backup) and it failed to boot off the USB drive with an error about insufficient buffers. No backup of the boot USB memory stick. Installed 5.5 to a new USB stick, created a new VM using existing disk and it booted fine. All seemed well until I started getting complaints about missing data. There was 10 days of data just gone. By the time I had discovered this the Scheduled Backup had overwritten my good backup. My last Veeam backup was on the day that missing data occurred. Discovered snapshot fragments indicating an incomplete backup.

So to summarize, I created a new VM with a previous VM's VMDK that had not been consolidated.

Now I want to try recovery tools but it is taking ages. I have a standalone Core-i7 PC with 2 x 2TB SSD drives in Raid-0. I want to copy the entire Datastore from the host to this box so I can run recovery scans at a decent speed.

Is this possible?

Details: HP Proliant DL380p G8 with 4x1TB SATA Drives in Raid5

ESXi 5.1 was installed on USB drive

ESXi 5.5 installed after failing to boot

Re: Windows server 2008 converted to Dynamic Volume will not start

Desertsweeper — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 03:41:20 GMT

OK I solved this. These are the steps I took in case anyone has this issue:

I exported the VMachine to an OVF Template on my local PC. I used "WinImage" to convert this to VHD image which I could mount in VirtualBox (only because I am familiar with it). I hit F12 in VirtualBox (after mounting a Windows Server CD-ROM to the machine) which booted Windows Server off the CD and allowed me to start the recovery command prompt. I guess the conversion somehow striped the "dynamic" volumes as they could be seen now. I ran:

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot

bootrec /rebuildbcd and brought the OS back into the bootable list

>restart

For the first time Windows tried to boot but I got a BSOD so I figured it was just a Storage Controller error. I used WinImage to convert it back to a vmdk which I was able to boot in VMware Workstation by editing it to "IDE".

Successful boot!... and then just "uploaded" to the ESXi Hypervisor from VMworkstation after attaching to the host server.

Re: Windows server 2008 converted to Dynamic Volume will not start

Desertsweeper — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 20:44:22 GMT

What is interesting is that if I connect to the server with the standalone-converter it sees all the partitions...but even if I try to install a new windows server onto the existing VM it doesn't recognize the disk anymore...

I "converted" the machine to a VMworkstation on my PC and although i get the same "The Boot selection failed because a required device is not inaccessible" I am able to mount the partitions by mapping to a local drive and browse them. Everything is there...frustrating!

Windows server 2008 converted to Dynamic Volume will not start

Desertsweeper — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 08:39:35 GMT

Hello

I am running the free eSXI v5.1 Hypervisor. In an attempt to increase the size of my boot partition I changed it to a dynamic volume. When i restarted the machine would not start "no boot device". I installed it with the Paravirtual SCSI controller. I have booted of a Windows Server installation CD in an attempt to "repair" the server but even with manually loading the Paravirtual drivers it does not see the windows operating system. Do I start from scratch or is there any hope?

Many thanks for any suggestions in advance.

Re: [ warning] [vmusr:vmusr] Error in the RPC receive loop: RpcIn: Unable to send

Desertsweeper — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 09:28:03 GMT

I am also having this issue. It is a fresh install using the HP distro of 5.1 Update 1 - it is not an upgrade. The solution proposes installing Update 1 to resolve but that is what I am already running....