ESX crashes during VEM installation

[Aki1]

Hi!

Another interesting issue occurred during laboratory testing...

Setup:

- Two ESX hosts with four PNICs.

- One host was set up to run VSM (without VEM).

- The other host was set up to run VEM.

During VEM installation, the ESX host crashed (reason unknown). It did not come alive at all and therefore ESX needed to be installed again. Once installation was done, ESX host was seen properly on the vCenter. However, installation had gone so far that vCenter thought that this host is actually installed into Nexus1000. Therefore vCenter did not allow the removal of the host from DVS (Nexus 1000) (objects existed) nor the addition of the host again. And since you could not go to Host -> Networking -> DVS and remove PNICs from the host, the relation of the objects could not be removed.

The question is; What is the correct procedure to get everything up and running again? Install VEM manually? Try to remove everything from vCenter? We ended up doing the following:

* Remove existing vswif0 from console.

* Remove "stale" host from datacenter. This removes host also from the Nexus1000.

* Create a new vswif0.

* Add host to DC.

* Add host to Nexus1000.

BR,

Aki

[lwatta]

To get the host back your steps should work. Add a PNIC back to vSwitch0 and either move or add a new vswif to vSwitch0. If you are comfortable with esxcfg commands it takes about 5 minutes.

I'm concerned that you had a system crash during install of the VEM. Did you get a PSOD? Can you grab a vmware support from the ESX host? We'd like to figure what caused the crash.

louis

[Aki1]

Hi!

Unfortunately it seems that I have only questions and can provide no answers for your questions.

The crash occurred so that ESX console was full of error messages, which I, of course, did not record. A reboot did not recover the host and thus I had to reinstall it completely. Therefore I am not able to get further information from the host.

Sorry,

Aki