Just think, your lab is  in a week time and you’ve lost your all virtual machines (pub, sub, unity etc?). The ESX server doens’t boot !! hiue.. happy birthday!

Well I put about 15 hours to figure out how to bring up the creshed VMWARE ESX server.

Root cause of server CRESH:

I tried mounting 1TB disk to VMWARE but vmware ESX server kernel and anaconda doesn’t have UCCI support for USB devices.
As a result it creshed the VMWARE modules and I couldn’t recover it by using several methods including – booting from redhat/fedora/centos disk/, esxcfg-boot -p -r stuffs. nothing seemed working.
I found that the /etc/pam.d files were gone when I chrooted the ESX server hard drive. also in /etc/sysconfig/network-script/  -the folder was empty.

Solution:

It was damn easy. I wasted whole saturday night trying to figure out the best method. The challenge was I had unity, ipcc, CCM 4 to 6 vmware images in the server. So building from the screach wasn’t an option.

I tried everything but still no luck till 4am.  I took some fizzy drinks and had a quick nap of 20 minutes and then resumed what I was doing. A new idea came up in my head. Google didn’t tell me what to do and any helpy url. I popped in the vmware ESX 3.0.1 CD to my other laptop’s cdrom and started installing it.  I saw there is an option when you install a new server which says  tick on “do you want to keep existing .vmx/datastore”, just ticked there.  I was so relexed afte rseeing that option.  I took that CD out from my laptop and popped into the ESX 3.0.1 monster server (ML580) and started installation. During installation there is an option
which says “keep your vmstore” and wipe out everything. Volla … here you go , the mother of all trouble was  just sitting there in ESX partion option.

So I choose > install (not upgrade)>> then ticked on that keep old vmware-store in partion prepration step and continued the installation procedure.

In a nutshell, above excercise installed VMWARE ESX server and  also retained old partition which had my all vmware images.

The whole above process only took 40 minutes.

After installation finished, the server boot up with a fleshy screen asking for password. after I punched my password immediately i checked .vmx files and found they are there…

Sometime it’s too easy task but we seems not finding it right away. I hate vendor not documenting things like that. Yes vmware have poor documentation which wasted my Saturday night staying at home and doing nothing but playing with vmware esx box.

Anyhow, it was a good fun and i really enjoyed as there was  a challenge and it was good to find out solution by myself.

-push bhatkoti

CCIE voice#21569