Friday, December 25, 2015

Painting yourself into a corner... VMware Style


Forgive me, I have not posted. Now I appear to have some time tonight. VMware used to be ESX.  Then it became ESXi then View (excuse me.. Horizon View) on top of ESXi.  You get the picture.

I was planning on patching 4 ESXi hosts used for VMware View..  I moved the VMs off, placed the host into maintenance mode and waited for the VMs to move.  Once in maintenance mode go to Update Manager and then go to the patches and apply. The host reboots and NORMALLY comes back. You exit maintenance mode and move on to the next host.  No muss, no fuss.

NOT THIS TIME. The host did not reconnect with vCenter. Was it down? I could ping it and connect to the host with a direct client connection. Now what?!?

Off to the Google for some suggestions. Apparently in VMware 5.5 you cannot get an ESXi host with Update 3 to connect to a vCenter with LESS than Update 3 on it also.

Now lets go to the remote console (iDRAC in this case) to remedy the situation. NO. I did not configure it.  This is not good...

Off to the customer site at 9PM.

Once on site at the customer, I did save my bacon with something else I came across in my searching. The "SHIFT+R". The SHIFT+R at the boot screen allows you to revert to the previous build. So I:

1. Booted
2. Shift+R
3. Said "Y" to confirm
4. Rebooted and all was good.

What did we learn:

1. RESEARCH the patches
2. HAVE THE iDRAC SET UP
3. KNOW YOUR ESCAPE ROUTE