Problem: Deleting inactive datastore with Storage I/O Control enabled - catch-22

[mwdicksion]

Hi all,

I'm trying, and failing, to get rid of an inactive datastore. Attempts to delete it fail with the message "Can't remove datastore '[DatastoreName]' because Storage I/O Control is enabled on it." Attempts to disable SIOC on the datastore fail with the message "Datastore ' ' is not available." Any suggestions to help me kill this zombie datastore would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[lamw]

Is the datastore actually available and accessible? Are you running ESX or ESXi?

=========================================================================

William Lam

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VMware VCAP4-DCA

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Twitter: @lamw

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[mwdicksion]

Everything in the datastore has been deleted as far as I can tell, but I'm pretty sure the underlying LUN is still there. ESXi. Sorry, my coworker is a little fuzzy on exactly what he's done to the datastore so far (which is another issue in and of itself).

[lamw]

1) I would verify the host can see and access the datastore, try to touch a file or create a dummy VM, is that successful? If you have done any storage work to remove the LUN, you may want to revert that back or restore it

2) If the above works but you're unable to disable SIOC which requires vCenter, you can try this ... but note USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. There is an unsupported option of enabling/disabling SIOC w/o vCenter, I blogged about it here - http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2010/10/does-sioc-actually-require-enterprise.html

I would highly recommend filing a ticket with VMware Support to get this resolved, but if you don't have any data and you wanted to try option #2, you can.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware VCP3,4

VMware VCAP4-DCA

VMware scripts and resources at:

Twitter: @lamw

Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)

Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

VMware Developer Community

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[mwdicksion]

So it turns out the LUN was deleted. It has since been recreated, but vCenter doesn't seem able to link the datastore to the recreated LUN.

Really it seems like all I need to do is eliminate the entry for the datastore, since the LUN it wants no longer exists. Is there any way to do that?

[beovax]

did you manage to resolve this? We have a customer in the same situation. A little worried as last time the ESX hosts tried to poll the storage that was missing and eventually killed everything.

We have a call open with VMware, so I will post a fix if they have one, but any help between now and their 8 hour reponse would be handy

[beovax]

VMware say the fix is to put each host that could see the datastore into maitenance mode and reboot it - just testing this now

[beovax · Accepted solution]

reboot did the trick.

Stop, think, reboot

[mwdicksion]

Yep, that did the trick! After two hours of vmotioning and rebooting, anyway. But it beats performaing command line voodoo on the hosts, which was the other option I was looking at. Thanks!

[hafeezpashamoha]

I had same problem and was bagging my head around (didn't call VMware though).

vMotion VMs VMDK to available DS and reboot ESXi host.

fixed.

[TopMitch]

Another suggestion that worked for me.

After vMotioning the VMs and rebooting the host, the inactive datastore was still there.

So, in the summary tab, I took a chance and unmounted the inactive datastore from THAT location on all of my hosts.  Well, it worked.  The inactive datastore is gone from everything now.  Man...spent a lot of time on this, happy it's fixed though.

ESXi 5.0