At my workplace, we rely on ESXi hosts and vCenter to manage our virtual machines (VMs). Recently, one of our ESXi hosts rebooted unexpectedly, and now nearly all the VMs on that host won't start up! I've tried everything: reverting to snapshots, cloning, and even migrating them to another host—they just won't turn on. This is concerning because we have important data stored on those VMs. Has anyone experienced something similar or have any ideas on what went wrong?
5 Answers
It sounds like you need to dig into the host logs first. They often contain clues about what caused the issue. Analyzing those logs is really important before jumping to conclusions.
Check your VMware.log file in the VM directory. Also, if there were snapshots hanging around longer than 72 hours while the VM was still running, that could have created problems.
This happened to us too! We had an issue with expired certs on the storage controller which blocked VM access. Consider your setup and check if there are similar issues with data access.
I’ve dealt with this kind of thing before. Sometimes VMs get corrupted after a dirty shutdown. If you have regular backups, you can restore things. It's also wise to have application-level backups instead of relying solely on snapshots—those can fail if kept too long.
The issue could be with the virtual disks themselves. If they're corrupted, you might need to restore them from backups taken prior to the reboot. If locks are causing the problem, there are methods to diagnose and unlock them too—just research VM log files for more info.
I’ll check the logs more thoroughly. Thanks for the advice!