If you do some wrong operations for your VMware ESXi, there is an ESXi recovery mode to help you back to the previous hypervisor version. Let’s see how to do it!
Updated by Nick Zhao on 2023/06/07
VMware ESXi, a virtual machine software, can be installed on a physical server directly without another operating system. You can think of it as an independent operating system that will optimize the use of your server with a few configurations.
For many enterprises, data recovery is very important, and ESXi recovery mode is offered by VMware to help clients’ businesses. Let’s see how to do it.
There are always some kinds of failures that happened during the operation so you are going to do VMware hypervisor recovery. For this, you can use ESXi recovery mode to solve it.
You can roll back to the previous version of ESXi without any problems. More than one hypervisor version should be needed because the system can’t choose the previous hypervisor with only one version.
However, sometimes the previous version is not perfect or errorless which means caution is still needed when you decide to start ESXi recovery mode. Therefore, think about it comprehensively before you do it. In this post, you can have a basic understanding of how to use it.
ESXi recovery mode can offer you the ability to roll back to a previous version of hypervisor. If you do something by mistake, don’t worry about this issue, recovery mode can help you. There are a few situations when you can use ESXi recovery mode:
1. If you have a storage structure failure, document deletion, formatting, or initialization by misoperation, you can use ESXi recovery mode to recover it.
2. When you delete virtual machine files or configuration files by mistake, you also can use this mode to fix it.
3. If you have VMFS structure error by doing volume expansion, you can try recovery mode to solve it.
4. ……………
If you consider there is a problem with the host such as service slowing down or crushing, but you are not sure about using it or not, there is also a way for you, you can roll back to the previous version before the update. And you should know that you need to update it again after you return to the previous one.
If you have a running ESXi host, you can see <SHIFT+R: Recovery Mode> at the bottom right corner. And when you become stuck in some problems like file loss, misoperation, or other issues, hypervisor recovery can help you.
So firstly, you need to reboot your host from DCUI > enter “reboot” at the command line > see the screen which shows recovery and the button “Y”. Press it
Then it will help you roll back to the previous one.
Note: Please be sure that you have more than one hypervisor before you do hypervisor recovery because if there is no alternative one to replace and no selection for the system, then you will see a warning on the screen and it will only boot the available one.
From this post, you’ve already known that ESXi recovery mode is useful for rolling back a hypervisor version. By the way, VM data backup is a big part, you need an all-round backup solution.
As an enterprise data protection solution, Vinchin Backup & Recovery supports more than 10 virtualization platforms such as VMware, Hyper-V, XenSever, XCP-ng, Oracle, and so on, giving you a high availability for your business.
With Vinchin Backup & Recovery, you can get instant VM recovery and it will help you recover your host within 15 seconds, reducing loss and improving clients’ experience.
Vinchin Backup & Rcovery supports agentless backup, taking a less resource consumption and maintenance cost.
LAN-free backup is supported to reduce LAN traffic consumption, giving you a smooth network environment.
We also can help you to move VM from one different virtualization platform to another one(V2V). (Hyper-V is not supported for now)
Vinchin Backup & Recovery has more than 10000 clients in 100 countries, which gives us rich experience in helping more enterprises and inventing plenty of new products. If you are interested in our product, you can start a 60-day full-featured free trial here. If you have some questions about using it, please contact us. In addition, we have many local partners around the world, please check it on our website.
ESXi recovery mode is a very helpful tool for VMware users, especially when you get some problems in using your hypervisor due to wrong operations. But don’t be worried, you can roll back to the previous version to solve it.
Enterprise data is the important thing for its whole business, so data protection should be put at the top level. You can use Vinchin Backup & Recovery to backup and restore your data. If you need data protection or VM backup, you can try the free trial.
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