Attempts to add Datastore from ESXi 4.1 on attached HP SB40c storage blade fail

[RLBoydNC]

I'm working with an HP full height BL680c server blade with an attached SB40c storage blade. The server boots from the internal drives in the server blade. When the server boots, it sees 2 storage controllers: 1 that is physically internal to the server. The 2nd is connected through the blade enclosure backplane to the storage blade sitting right next to the server blade.

The attached storage is set up as a single logical drive and shows up as a Local VMware Disk mpx.vmhba3:C0:T0:L0, LUN 0. The capacity is 1.09 TB currently. When I attempt to add storage through the vSphere Client wizard I select the disk and click Next. The next thing I see is a popup window saying "An error occurred during host configuration." and the error stack message is:

Call "HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "192.168.10.221" failed.

The other window underneath shows Location /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba:3:C0:T0:L0 "The hard disk is blank."

I've tried a number of suggestion from the forum related to this error message. So far all of them have resulted in no change to the error I'm getting.

I've tried initializing the partition table or not from the command line console of the VMware Host. The failure is the same whether there is a valid partition table or not.

How can I diagnose and resolve this problem? The system clearly sees the storage.

[RLBoydNC]

I moved things a little farther along by booting the server with gparted live. With gparted I discovered that the HP Array Configuration Utility created a 128MB "boot" partition on the drive. I deleted that partition. Then I rebooted ESXi. I was able to get almost to the end of the add storage wizard process before it blew up again with the same error message.

So I rebooted gparted and from a terminal window invoked

1. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/cciss/c1d0

I let that run for a while -- I'm thinking I might have been able to accomplish the same thing with the HP SmartStart Erase System function, but I didn't think of trying that.

After zeroing out a couple of hundred GB I rebooted ESXi, brought up the vSphere Client and was able to add the storage without any problem at all.

[RLBoydNC]

I would like to suggest to the development folks at VMware who support the datastore add/management code, that they improve the code to do 2 or 3 things:

1. Alert the user that there is something on the storage that needs to be erased

2. Ask the user if they really want to erase it

3. Wipe out whatever is out there -- erase/write over, destroy, etc.

A person really shouldn't have to get down to command line tools to initialize storage that just happens to have something like this.

[trickybits]

Your post saved me some time, as I bumped into this exact problem today. So cheers

I had to re-initialize the logical drives on my SAN to be able to proceed.

Agreed, this should be fixed.

[Chr15tio]

I had the very same problem on a Proliant DL 380. Didn't erase the disks properly, that's what I've learned here.

But after erasing with Erase System from HP smartstart, I did NOT resolve the problem.