A Virtual Machine on one of our Hyper-Visor hosts vanished. It was no longer listed. When I opened the Fail-Over cluster management console to see if it had failed over to another node it was marked as a failed service.
I checked the for the VM Configuration Files and the Virtual Hard Drives on the shared storage. All files existed.
After a quick Google search I found several articles pointing to a corrupt configuration file.
I opened the .xml file and sure enough a closing HTML tag was incomplete:
After closing the Hyper-Visor Console and reopening it on the host I was able to see the VM and restart it.
If the above doesn’t work. Delete the virtual machine and recreate it. Here is how I do that:
1. Note the node that owns the virtual machine
2. In Fail-over Cluster Manager delete the resource.
3. On the Node that owns the missing virtual machine open Share and Storage Manager and go to Manage Open Files
4. Close all connection files and folders that have to do with the missing machines Configuration.
5. Rename the Configuration folder
6. On a Fail-over node create a new machine and pick the existing vhd file for the missing server.
7. Go to the settings of the new virtual machine and make sure it is set to migrate to machines with different hardware.
8. From Fail-over Cluster Manager add the new server
9. Start the new virtual machine
10. Connect to it from its Host
11. Set the IP address.
NOTE: If MS Office is installed you have to re-register it.