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mikelane
Expert
Expert

ESXi is losing one of its local datastores

I have a ESXi white box which was running without problems until I added a second hard drive.

This is my hardware:

ASRock ALIVENF6G-VSTA AM2 NVidia 6100 Motherboard 1

AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 Brisbane 2.3GHz 2

Intel Pro MT 1000 NIC 3

OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (x2) 4

PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II Controller Card 5

Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive 6

SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB ATX12V 330W Power Supply 7

I currently have 3 VMs, two of which are running - 1 on each hard drive / datastore.

Both hard drives are of the same type as above.

ESXi will run for maybe 24 hours with both datastores and then inexplicably one of the datastores will disappear from ESXi.

One VM runs XUbuntu and the other runs on Ubuntu JeOS - it is the latter that if affected when the datastore disappears.

Can anyone advise on what troubleshooting I should perform to try and see what the problem is?

Neither of the VMs is under any kind of heavy workload.

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2 Replies
RParker
Immortal
Immortal

You can be here for hours trying to diagnose a problem with ESX, and in the end it takes like 10 minutes to do a COMPLETE reinstall, reconfigure the box, and move on. That's what I would do.

ESX is finicky when it comes to adding additional hardware, I have found. It's best to start from scratch, retain the vmfs partitions, and just start over.

Of course with ESXi you can't do this, because there is no way to upgrade... Which is why we keep using the ESX 3.5 console Smiley Happy I know there MUST be more people out there that use ESXi so why VM Ware did this.. makes no sense. 2 products, onlyl difference is console why they are 2 completely different products, It's very odd.

At any rate, it's easier to diagnose problems with ESX 3.5 in a console or putty session... If you can't find the solution you can preserve your sanity, migrate the VM's, rebuild the box with 3.5 and move them back. That's the best most efficient method, unless there is a quick fix for your situation...

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mikelane
Expert
Expert

In that case I think that I will back up my VMs and just wipe the drives and start over.

The problem might be that I added the 2nd drive and then ESXi would not boot as it tried to boot from the new drive which I then installed ESXi to - so ESXi is actually installed on both drives.

I hope that this will fix things - I will let you know! Smiley Happy

EDIT: Well I reinstalled ESXi and checked my box over and again within 24 hours ESXi lost the same datastore, so I am returning the drive to seagate - as I only have issue with one drive so I am hoping that it is not the SATA card ...

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