Did DRS destroy my guest OS VMDK while (temporarily) on local storage?

[rick-vanover]

So I put a powered off VM on local drive after I cloned it as something I could go back to if I needed it. After I cloned it, it appears that DRS moved it - but did not move the drive VMDK file.

Has anyone had this happen? The VM was rendered useless without the disk. When I then went into the VM inventory, there was a default 4 GB drive - but not the 28 GB drive I used to have. On the original host, the file was not there, so I could not point the VM to that disk.

Here are some relevant entries from the VPX_EVENT table:

vim.event.TaskEvent 30:05.6 info 193 SERVER1 130 ESX-1.company.net

vim.event.VmBeingRelocatedEvent 30:06.6 info 193 SERVER1 130 ESX-1.company.net

vim.event.VmRelocatedEvent 30:31.1 info 193 SERVER1 128 ESX-2.company.net

vim.event.VmStartingEvent 30:33.3 info 193 SERVER1 128 ESX-2.company.net

vim.event.VmFailedToPowerOnEvent 30:49.2 error 193 SERVER1 128 ESX-2.company.net

These events were not envoked by me, but by DRS. The message in the VIC for the 'vmFailedToPowerOnEvent' was "A file was not found". I think DRS is playing battleship with me!!!!! Can anyone confirm or enlighten?

[MR-T]

This issue hasn't been caused by DRS.

Think of DRS as automativ vmotion. It only moves the contents of memory and keeps the connection to the disk. The vmdk file's never move.

I'm not sure what's happened here, but it's more likely someone has manually moved or deleted one of the vmdk files associated with this virtual machine.

[rick-vanover]

The DB had no entries by me on moving or deleting the disk. Also, the VM was powered off during the DRS migration.

[GWVM]

Hi Rick

Thinking about what MR-T said, DRS only shifts the contents of whats in memory - not physical disk around. The only thing that occurs related to disk is a lock change when the host ownership of the VM changes.

It also bases its activities on how busy the host is at the time - was your host working pretty hard when this issue occurred for DRS to kick in - I assume DRS is setup to automatically migrate based on recommendations?

I'm wondering if there is an issue managing 3.0.2 hosts using VC 2.5? It almost appears like a cold vMotion (where disk is relocated) was invoked by something?

[opbz]

you mention this VM was on local storage? in that case DRS had nothing to do to it. It will only move machines that are powerred on and on shared storage.

By the way there is storage vmotion on ESX 3.5 where it will move a running VM to a different datastorage. But that again does not appear to be the case.

You also have and option to move VM files which looks more possible

[rick-vanover]

All valid points above, but the issue is the vim.event.VmRelocatedEvent 30:31.1 info 193 SERVER1 128 ESX-2.company.net task did not have a user associated to it. Here is a graphical view, maybe better seen that way: