Backup and restore ESXi via PowerCLI after a failed boot device

A few days ago I encountered the following error in the webclient of my homelab.

lost_connectivity_to_the_device_mpx

"Lost connectivity to the device mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 backing the boot filesystem /vmfs/devices/disk/mpx.vmhba32 :C0:T0:L0. As a result, host configuration changes will not be saved to persistent storage."

In a production environment you would now check the events of your out-of-band management component (IMM, iLO, DRAC, etc.) for a failed SD-card or USB boot device. In such a situation a reboot of the ESXi host (e.g. after doing some updates) wouldn’t be a good idea. To fix the problem we need to …

  1. replace the boot device
  2. reinstall ESXi
  3. reconfigure ESXi (in an automated PowerCLI way)

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