Need to remount existing Datastore w/o destroying all data.

[ianspooky]

Hi All,

I have a Dell R710 server and vsphere 6.5 with 3 datastore. I had a planned maintenance trying to add more RAM. When i boot back the server i notice it detected a foreign config even i didn't remove the existing HDDs. so i import it and continue the boot. After vsphere has booted i access it and all of my VM's are Invalid so I check on the datastore and nothing is mounted. Tried to add, all HDD not showing on the list. My initial resolution was downgrading to 6.0 and using vsphere client software I am able to add the 2 smaller Datastore but when I tried to add the 4TB it says all the data will be permanently gone.

Can you give me advise what can I do to mount the missing datastore. I need the VM on that drive :(. It's an old system i build many years back. It's hard to rebuild all those VM residing on that drive 😞

Regards,

Ian

[IRIX201110141]

Show us the output of

esxcfg-volume -l

Most likely the presentation of the LUN have changed and now ESXi refused to mount it automatically. With esxcfg-volume -h you will see how to do it when the command from above show whats going on.

Regards,
Joerg

[ianspooky]

There is no output when I do the command.

[continuum]

The chance to do serious damage while experimenting is significant here.
I would suggest to consult support of the raid-controller vendor and ask them for suggestion.
Parallel to that I would suggest to analyse the content of the datastore in its current state IN READONLY MODE.
To do that you would use vmfs-tools from Linux or much better UFSexplorer.
Do you have a second healthy datastore that could be used to create a Linux VM ?
That VM could then be used to safely analyse the current state.

Ulli

[ianspooky]

Yes I have a spare HDD. Will try to install it and add linux VM. Will let you know when it's done.

[continuum]

The spare HDD will be used to create a second datastore ? - good - do that.

Ulli

[a_p_]

You should not use the Windows vSphere Client in such a case. IIRC it cannot handle datastores with more than ~2TB.

What you may want to do is to run esxcli storage vmfs snapshot list from host's the command line to find out whether the datastore has been detected as a so called snapshot LUN. If it is, you may follow the steps in the Command Line section of https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1011387 to manually mount the datastore.

André