Scenario: Host Crash while Guests are on!

[Feltrek]

I just stood up a new ESX 3.5 update 2 server today and I wanted to perform DR test.

1. Power On Guest running on NFS shared Storage

2. Disconnected ESX server from Virtual Center

3. Guest shows as On and Disconnected via VC Inventory and Templated

4. Browsed NFS storged from another Host

5. Attempted to Add Guest into Inventory

6. Received Error: Server error: The specified key, name, or identifier already exists Adding to Inventory

Say if I was in a situation and I really lost a host, How would I go about bringing a guest that was running on Shared storgage up on another host?

7. Would Hard Powering off the host produce a different test result since perhaps VC sees the disconnected host still on the network?

I guess the potential for this happening exists so I would like to work through in a controled environment. HA/DRS would be the best resolution, but given the scenario above what steps would you take?

[mike_laspina]

Hello,

If the hosts are managed by VC and have shared storage as you do you would simply drag and drop the VM to a working host and there would be no messages about the same VM UUID found.

Since you disconnected the host the UUID remains available in the DB. Adding the same VM back to inventory will result in the message about that UUID being present in the DB.

You would ofcourse in this case keep the UUID as it is the same VM.

An yes HA does the drag and drop function automatically for you.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

"Received Error: Server error: The specified key, name, or identifier already exists Adding to Inventory" - when you say you disconnected the ESX server did you leave it in the VC Inventory because this error comes about because the VM was already part of the VC inventory - you would need to remove the VM from the inventory but you would still have problems trying to re-add it as long as it is running -

"if I was in a situation and I really lost a host, How would I go about bringing a guest that was running on Shared storgage up on another host?" - first thought would be invest in VMware HA it will restart the VM for you - if you do not have HA you will have to remove the host from the inventory and then browse to the VM location on the NFS server and add the VM to the inventory -

"Would Hard Powering off the host produce a different test result since perhaps VC sees the disconnected host still on the network?" - slightly you will need to remove the Host from the VC Inventory so that the vm is removed form the inventory and it needs to be powered off so you can add it back into the inventory

I would recommend HA -

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[Feltrek]

No, I cannot drag the guest over in the traditional way since it is disconnected.

I have tried to change the state of the Guest through CLI via another host using vmware-cmd, but that is not working.

VMControl error -11: No such virtual machine

[Feltrek]

Thank you!

Once I removed the "downed" disconnected host from the Datacenter in Virtual Center I was then able to successfully add the "stranded" guest into Inventory by navigating to it through the NFS datastore on another ESX host.

I should add that once I added the guest into inventory of a new host I was prompted as to what to do with the Guests identifier -- keep, recreate, etc. I then chose to keep the exiting identifier.

[mike_laspina]

I did just that with a system in a case where the entire storage system when down and boot from SAN was lost for all hosts. I had to rebuild each host and with out removing them from inventory I named them the same and used the same IP. Each host was reconnected using the root ID and I could then drag and drop all the other dead VM's from the shared storage to the new host without adding them to inventory.