ESXi PSOD #Homelab #vExpert #ESXi

So I booted up my HP Z600, this houses my main management VMs and ESXi runs off a usb stick. So nothing fancy.

On boot up I got this lovely screen of joy:

I don’t like PSODs they make me sad. Looking at the error and the fact that it was happening at boot up made me think of some USB drive issue.

Let’s think about it for a minute, when ESXi is loaded off a USB/SD card it will then run in memory, and if you make a change it will save it to the drive or it will save automatically every hour (KB ). One thing you have to remember is to make sure you configure the advance setting to send logs to a shared datastore, otherwise you could run into issues!

As an IT guy….what do you think the first thing I tried was???? Of course I tried turning it off and back on again lol

So I did some digging on Google (just like any good IT person would) and came across this:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/488990

So this lead me to believe something had become corrupted. Now some people say do a fresh install (perfectly acceptable thing to do). I however decided to try and load from the ALT Bootbank. If you have done any patching you will know that the older version is copied to the ALT Bootbank, this is so you can revert back in case the patching goes sideways.

So I did this by rebooting and hitting SHIFT+R just before ESXi starts loading.

If you want to read a deep dive on how ESXi is installed check this out:

http://www.vmwarearena.com/what-i-wish-everyone-knew-about-esxi-partition/

So this obviously reverted me to a slightly older version of ESXi and I was back in business.

The issue now was that a lot of the config changes I had made were all lost! OH NOOOOOO I AM GOING TO HAVE TO DO THEM ALL AGAIN!!!

Now if you read my previous post about backing up host configs using PowerCLI, you will know I had the configuration saved!

So I just restored that from my local laptop using PowerCLI. After the configuration has been taken, the host will reboot automatically.

That KB tells you all you need to know about restoring configs, it is very simple.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2042141 

After the reboot everything was back exactly as it was with no issue. All my configs were restored. Now all I needed to do was just patch it to the latest build, which doesn’t need me to blog about!

Time to quote DJ KHALED:

Ideally you would want to patch to the same build of ESXi that the config was backed-up from, but as long as it isn’t anything fancy it shouldn’t really matter. I restored a config backup from a newer patch level to an earlier patch level of ESXi 6.5u2 and it made no difference.

If it happens again I am going to bin the USB stick, it was a freebie and maybe it just isn’t cut out for the #Homelab life