Thursday, January 31, 2013

Remote Server Management Brain Teaser

I have a fun little puzzle to work out. Yesterday around 4pm, one of our remote servers at a branch office in the middle of nowhere (Culbertson, MT) had a RAID controller failure resulting in a corrupt and unbootable ESXi 5.0 server. This is a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III server with a DRAC 5 card. I have the system booted up via DRAC from a live Ubuntu 12.10 desktop CD with mvfs-tools installed so I can access/backup the datastore. I have co-opted the guest workstation from that office via TeamViewer and have shared out a directory. Unfortunately, all the workstations in that office appear to have 250GB HDDs in them (formatted down to 230GB, minus the 15-20GB of OS and applications gives me at most 210GB free). I need to back up a VMDK file that is 250GB, and since I can't boot the ESXi box to export (compress) the vm image, I'm sorta limited on my options. I could overnight a USB HDD for them to plug into the server, I could try to split the VMDK into multiple 25GB files and try to copy the first two or so to another system, or something else. Still pondering this one while one of the staff in that office runs home to see how big her external hard drives she isn't using are.

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