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Hello all,<br />
<br />
This has not happened to me yet, but I am proactively wondering. &nbsp;Say you have a couple of non critical, but still somewhat important hosts running, each having a collection of local data stores (7200 RPM SATA drives). &nbsp;Some of these hosts are not RAIDed, (yes yes, I know, out of my control). &nbsp;VMs are spread across these local data stores, never really exceeding two VMs pre SATA hard drive. &nbsp;ESXI resides on one of these hard drives. <br />
<br />
My question is, what would be the theoretical procedure in this non ideal scenario, to recover the host and get the VMs up and running again if all else was fine except that the one hard drive that housed ESXI had died?<br />
<br />
Do I simply replace the hard drive and re-install ESXI on that new hard drive, give it the same network settings as before, attach to vCenter and then scan the local data stores that house the VMs and re-add them to the inventory?<br />
<br />
Thanks for the information.
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Hello all,

This has not happened to me yet, but I am proactively wondering.  Say you have a couple of non critical, but still somewhat important hosts running, each having a collection of local data stores (7200 RPM SATA drives).  Some of these hosts are not RAIDed, (yes yes, I know, out of my control).  VMs are spread across these local data stores, never really exceeding two VMs pre SATA hard drive.  ESXI resides on one of these hard drives. 

My question is, what would be the theoretical procedure in this non ideal scenario, to recover the host and get the VMs up and running again if all else was fine except that the one hard drive that housed ESXI had died?

Do I simply replace the hard drive and re-install ESXI on that new hard drive, give it the same network settings as before, attach to vCenter and then scan the local data stores that house the VMs and re-add them to the inventory?

Thanks for the information.

Get host backup and running after the data store that houses ESXI dies?

Storage devices include any device used for storing and retrieving digital information. Hard disk drives (HDDs) use one or more rigid ("hard") rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. The primary competing technology for secondary storage is flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), but HDDs remain the dominant medium for secondary storage due to advantages in price per bit and per-device recording capacity. CD-RW (Compact Disc-ReWritable) is a digital optical disc storage format that allows information to be stored outside the mechanical HDD.

Storage Hardware

The term "Backup" means the methods and processes involved to copy computer data (system data as well as application data) to media other than the ones where the data originally live (disk, tape, optical, cloud). "Restore" in turn means the methods and processes involved in data recovery, i. e., bringing back copied computer data to their original location. Backup/Restore primarily serves as a means of protection against data loss, be it due to disaster, corruption or sabotage. It can also be used for recovering data from an earlier point in time and even for cloning machines or applications. There is a wide variety of backup/restore software available, from expensive commercial products to free or open source tools.

Storage Software

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.