Quick Restore in case of failed ESXi upgrade? | Nutanix Community
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Hi!

I am wondering, if there is a quick way to restore from a failed ESXi upgrade.

Imaging you have fired up a ONE-Klick-Upgrade of the ESXi image, and (as see with ESXi7.0U1GA) the hypervisor is not boot up again.

At ESXi level i can backup config and restore config after a plane install. But what about CVM?

Setting up the whole node with foundation is a nightmare, if the node is already installed in an customer environment, and can’t be discovered.

The best way would be, that the foundation within a cluster could deploy a CVM to a plain ESXi and rebuild the cluster-node from the information stored in the cluster...

Normally, there will not be any need to reinstall the CVM. The CVM is located on the SSDs while the ESXi is located on M2/Satadom devices, so the CVM is remaining unaffected if the ESXi upgrade fails. 

Very often, you can rollback the ESXi version if the boot process starts. This VMware kb explains how to do that: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1033604

If you manage to rollback successfully, you won’t need to do anything else and the node will be up and running and the CVM on it, too.

If it’s impossible to rollback and the boot process doesn’t even start, you can reinstall the ESXi completely, then boot the node into the phoenix ISO (can be downloaded from the Nutanix portal) and select “Configure hypervisor” in the phoenix menu. There is already a CVM present on the node, so the phoenix will only tie the new ESXi installation with the existing CVM. If you don’t feel comfortable with it, you can open a support case and our support folks will assist you.

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