I wanted to decommission an esxi server from VMware Cloud Foundation and recommission it to test the procedure but i ran into an issue . Here are the steps that i followed :
- Decommissioned the host from SDDC manager. Once decommissioned then the esxi password defaults back to EvoSddc!2016
2. Re-imaged the host using the VIA and selecting the device type as “ESXI_Server”
3. Once the host was installed then i assigned it an IP of 192.168.100.70 (has to be in the range of 192.168.100.50 – 192.168.100.73)
4. . Checked that SSH was enabled and the firewall rules were set correctly (connections restricted to the 192.168.100.0/22 subnet)
5. SSH’d to the VRM (SDDC Manager) VM and edited the following file to reflect the BMC username and password
/home/vrack/VMware/vRack/server-commission.properties
6. Then attempted to run the recommission script
sudo /home/vrack/bin/server-commission.sh
I could see that the host was being picked up correctly but the recommission procedure was failing :
Then i looked in the vrack-vrm.log which is located in /home/vrack/vrm/logs and i was able to get more information as to what was causing the commissioning to fail. It seemed that the host was trying to mount an nfs datastore and the procedure was failing
Then i logged into the host using the vSphere Client and could see that the host was trying to mount an NFS datastore from the LCM repository VM
I then examined this VM and could see that it didnt have any IP address and the nics were disconnected
I connected the NICS , rebooted the VM and it then showed valid IP addresses. I reran the host commission procedure and this time it succeeded
Once this had succeeded then i was able to see the host in the SDDC manager physical inventory and continue with the remaining steps to commission the host (Step 8 onwards)
