Purple Screen after server death

[Netspeed]

Folks,

Had a major hardware failure on a Dell 2900 server today and motherboard and backplane are dead

I have moved the drives and the raid card to a new server which is a similiar speced dell 2950(both have quad core Xeons)

The server starts up and when the Hyper progress bar finishes I then get a purple error screen below.

Where can I go from here ? Thanks in advance.

[Netspeed]

No ideas ?

[MartinAmaro]

From my experience this is normal behavior when trying to restore ESX to dissimilar hardware. Did you have virtual machines in the local drives?

It will be much better if you do a clean install and then join it the farm.

[Netspeed]

Can I just "reinstall" ESXi  ?

[MartinAmaro]

Yes, if you did not have any VMs in the local storage then you are good, the local disk will be formatted and the OS will be reinstall, configue it and then add the host to the a test cluster, make sure is working as expected, migrate some vms for further testing and finally move it to your prodution cluster.

PS. Make sure you disconnect your HBA cables before you run the install to prevent any issues.

[Netspeed]

Thanks for the quick reply Martin

Thats the problem. The VMs are only the local storage also.

I was thinking. I have a spare slot for another HD. What I was going to do was plug another drive in by itself into the Dell server and install ESXi on it.

I was then going to power it down and add the other disks and then I should be able to import them back into the host?

The other option I was thinking about was installing ESXi on a USB drive ?

[MartinAmaro]

installing in a USB drive might less risk.  then you can rsynch to another place.... I dont know that if during the install you can chose manual partition and then prevent the installation from formating the slice where you have the VMs

[Netspeed]

Really strange. I am getting a PSOD when trying to install to USB ....