ESX6i host can't see ESX4 datastores?

[ProcessWin]

Hello

Have a 6 month old Netapp FC box powering current ESX4 hosts, and trying to move to ESX6i (no vcenter).

I have a new ESX6i host with FC cards setup & zoned, but it can only see an unformatted LUN. It can't see any of the other 8 LUNs that are on the same SAN, all hardware is HCL certified (the FC cards are the same on both boxes).

Is this normal? Is there another step needed for this to be able to see VMFS volumes (I would just unregister these VMs on the old hosts & register on the new one).

Thanks

[a_p_]

Can you confirm that the LUNs are properly presented to the hosts (on the storage side)?

André

[ProcessWin]

Yes.

On these Netapp units you choose initiators on the SAN side (the same for all LUNs) and they present to all units zoned on a switch.

I've had an HP unit before where each LUN had to be individually presented to various hosts, but this is different. Because this new ESX6i box can only see an unformatted LUN makes me think it's a VMFS thing.

[continuum]

That sounds familiar.
I have seen a few cases where VMFS-datastores created by ESXi 4 were looking like they were empty if ESXi 5.5 or newer was used.
VMware support could not help and so we had to extract the data and create new datastores.
In one case I could get away with an "obscure" trick - I resignatured the volume manually using an ESXi 4.1 LiveCD

First thing I would try : check if the VMFS-volume is really empty or damaged.
If it is not damaged - boot one host into ESXi 4 - check if the datastore is mountable and readable.

IMPORTANT: the fact that ESXi 6 does display an empty or damaged datastore does not mean the volume is empty or damaged.
So do not rebuild or re-format the volume to early - at least wait for an analysis of the VMFS-header-dump.

dd if=/dev/disks/<device> of=/tmp/pboparai.1536 bs=1M count=1536

[jagdish_rana]

Hi,

Are you using extent LUN or single LUN per datastore?

[ProcessWin]

Unfortunately I can't boot into ESX4i because these Lenovo servers aren't supported

I may just pop the card into one of the other hosts just to verify the zoning.

Most are one LUN per volume.