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ESXi to baremetal as a disaster recovery strategy


unmesh

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I have a couple of DSM instances running as ESXi VMs with RDMed SATA hard drives and have recently begun thinking about a recovery strategy should I lose my sole ESXi server but not my hard drives. (I do have backups too in the form of baremetal but those are kept offline).

 

Is there a way to create USB drives from the synoboot vmdk files, edit grub.cfg with the new VID:PID and MAC address and boot a new supported system off this USB with the hard drives moved to this new system?

 

Or is it sufficient to create a new USB stick with the same version of bootloader, edit grub.cfg with the new VID:PID and the MAC address from the other system, and "reinstall" the appropriate version of DSM using the old credentials to the hard drives (that already have DSM on them)?

 

Would I have to be concerned about the order of the drives on the new SATA controller?

 

Thanks

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13 hours ago, unmesh said:

Or is it sufficient to create a new USB stick with the same version of bootloader, edit grub.cfg with the new VID:PID and the MAC address from the other system, and "reinstall" the appropriate version of DSM using the old credentials to the hard drives (that already have DSM on them)?

 

As long as the NIC and controller are supported baremetal (proof if you already passthrough), this will work fine and offer a "migration" install.

 

13 hours ago, unmesh said:

Would I have to be concerned about the order of the drives on the new SATA controller?

 

Always best to keep the order, but if the array was healthy prior to the migration, it shouldn't matter.

Edited by flyride
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  • 1 month later...

Today I tried to do this though a little differently than using a brand new USB bootloader.

 

My ESXi XPE VMs use the synoboot.img file and a .vmdk "wrapper" rather than generating a .vmdk file, both in the datastore. I shut down the VM, used the Datastore Browser to copy the current version of the synoboot.img from the ESXi server to my Windows laptop and flashed it to a USB drive. I then put both the USB drive and the Hard drive from the ESXi server into the N40L and booted the machine. Since this was just a test, I did not bother re-editing grub.cfg to change the USB VID:PID or the MAC address.

 

The bootloader showed its menu but DSM did not respond on the network. Should it have?

 

The "wrapper" .vmdk is posted below

 

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=32963afe
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"

# Extent description
RW 102400 VMFS "synoboot.img"

# The Disk Data Base 
#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.deletable = "true"
ddb.encoding = "UTF-8"
ddb.longContentID = "e090c58a0ae239a6b3dc2e7b32963afe"
ddb.thinProvisioned = "1"
ddb.toolsInstallType = "0"
ddb.toolsVersion = "2147483647"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 9a ee da ca 33-df 5e 04 3f 80 55 f9 62"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "10"

 

 

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