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Reconnecting ESXi servers with PowerCLI

We recently needed to re-ip our vCenter servers; each with ~200 ESXi servers which needed to be reconnected - thank goodness for PowerCLI.  Since there isn't a "Reconnect-VMHost" cmdlet provided by PowerCLI we needed to check the HostSystem Object at https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/converter-sdk/conv55_apireference/vim.HostSystem.html and to see what methods were available (hint: there's a ReconnectHost_Task method which will do the trick).  We can still leverage the "Get-VMHost" cmdlet to return the disconnected ESXi servers and then call the ReconnectHost_Task method to reconnect each ESXi server.  The code is fairly short:

 Get-VMHost -state Disconnected | foreach-object {
  $vmhost = $_
  $connectSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.HostConnectSpec
  $connectSpec.force = $true
  $connectSpec.hostName = $vmhost.name
  $connectSpec.userName = 'root'
  $connectSpec.password = 'MySecretPassword'
  $vmhost.extensionData.ReconnectHost_Task($connectSpec,$null)
}
Since the ReconnectHost_Task returns immediately and doesn't wait for the task to complete then you will see multiple reconnect tasks queued in vCenter.  This method does return a "Task" object which you can monitor for completion (blog post coming soon on that) before spawning another reconnect task.

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 29, 2016 at 6:01 AM

    # No need to repeat the following in the loop:
    $connectSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.HostConnectSpec
    $connectSpec.force = $true
    $connectSpec.userName = 'root'
    $connectSpec.password = 'MySecretPassword'

    # Loop only needs to update hostname and invoke reconnect
    Get-VMHost -state Disconnected | foreach-object {
    $vmhost = $_
    $connectSpec.hostName = $vmhost.name
    $vmhost.extensionData.ReconnectHost_Task($connectSpec,$null)
    }

    ReplyDelete
  2. ANKITJune 1, 2017 at 4:54 AM

    when running above script getting below error
    You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression.
    At C:\Users\root\Documents\myrec.ps1:25 char:42
    + $vmhost.extensionData.ReconnectHost_Task <<<< ($connectSpec)
    + CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (ReconnectHost_Task:String) []
    , RuntimeException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvokeMethodOnNull

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJune 20, 2017 at 11:40 PM

    It worked for me. Thanks for the help.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sridharanApril 19, 2018 at 6:57 AM

      Does it help connect the hosts back to respective clusters?

      Delete

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