Virtual Machines missing from vCenter .

[resh]

Hi There

I have a vCenter with a cluster of 2 ESX servers . Recently we noticed that 3 VMs are missing from the cluster. I have checked the Tasks and Events tab and dont see any logs regarding the VMs. But the strange thing is that the VMs are accessible. Both Windows XP Vms are able to access by Remote Desktop. I have checked for the vmdk , vmx etc on the ESX servers , but the directories are missing.My cluster has 6 shared storage (SAN LUNs)

Has anyone seen such a case earlier. Can anyone help me here ?

[Troy_Clavell]

If the guests are running, it just may be a vCenter thing. Have you tried restarting the vCenter Server Service?

If that doesn't work, check the ESX hosts to see if the guests in question are registered on them

vmware-cmd -l

If you see the guests in question registered also try restarting the management agents

service vmware-vpxa restart

[Toenuff]

I have seen this exact same problem. Our storage administrator accidentally formatted a lun that had vms on it. The files were missing from disk, but the vms were still running. Apparently the format didn't hit the exact location of the files so the esx hosts were able to continue using the disk where the files existed.... Once we shut down the vms and/or restarted the esx hosts they were gone forever. I'm not sure if this is your case, but I would make sure you have a backup of the data before shutting down anything.

[resh]

vmware-cmd -l does not list the guests. I have tried restarting the vCenter as well but to no avail.

[Troy_Clavell]

If these guests are no where to be found on any of the ESX Host, my suggestion would be to open an SR.

...but I would also recommend not shutting down the guests, because most likely they will not boot back up.

[resh]

Thanks for your all your inputs. I would make sure that I have necessary backups in place before i shutdown the Vms.