Twice now I've had an ESX host (Dell 2950, with both SAN storage and a large local VMFS) die, the symptoms being the VM's spitting out IO errors, and finally becoming unresponsive. Rebooting the host brings it up with the filesystem in read-only mode because fsck found errors. To make a long story short, reinstalling the OS worked, and I re-registered the VM's, and we're off to the races.
The second time this happened, at the BIOS screen I noticed that the PERC controller battery was giving a 'low battery' warning. I replaced the battery, but I always thought that battery was just to keep the RAID configuration for when the machine was switched off.
So, my question is, do you think replacing the battery is the fix? Or have I just bought myself another few weeks? Thanks!