Recovering Virtual Machines in Essentials or standalone host configurations after a host failure.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

If you are running the vSphere Essentials license which does not allow the creation of ESXi host clusters, or you are running standalone hosts, but are using shared storage between them and have a host failure you can recover your VM's onto the surviving host(s) to get them back online asap and then troubleshoot the failed host. 

Environment

Hosts with shared datastores, but no cluster services to configure HA/DRS. An example would be you have the vSphere Essentials licensing.

Resolution

From one of the surviving hosts you can use the datastore browser to navigate the datastores/vm folders to find the vmx files for the currently down guests and right click and add them to inventory on the other hosts with access. There are important things to note:

1. The host your recover the guest vm's onto must have network connectivity to the network(s) the guests use. Ideally with the same network name, but if the name is different, you can change it in the edit settings dialogue box. 

2. You must be using datastores that are either shared, or that are connectable to the other hosts you have available and mount those datastores to them. 

3. When you recover the original ESXi server and get it back online the guest VM's will still show up on that server and likely report as inaccessible (because the vmx file is locked from the host where it is running. You will need to remove them from inventory. If you have vMotion capability you can rebalance your VM load after the host is recovered. Otherwise, you will need to power off the VM's, unregister them from the current host, and register them back on the original.