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doreski
Contributor
Contributor

Missing Datastore from ESXI 6.7

Hi All,

Hoping someone can help me.

This is my setup. HP Server running ESXI from an internal 32GB SD card and local storage configured as my datastore.

I initially upgraded my ESXI from 6.5 to 6.7. During the setup I chose 'Upgrade' and not "Install'.

The Install itself went fine, no errors during the upgrade, server rebooted only to not boot any of my VM's.

I logged in to have a look and noticed that my datastore was now missing. The internal HDD's are detected (refer to pic) however, no datastore (refer to pic).

Now since ESXI is not installed on the same disks as my VM's.. I thought obviously something went wrong during the upgrade. So I performed the upgrade again, only this time during the setup process I chose 'Install' instead of 'Upgrade'. I didn't think this would be a problem because the ESXI hard disk and the datastore hard disks are separate disks.

Again, install went fine. No issues, no errors.. however I still cant see my datastore. Can anyone point in the right direction as to what is going on?

I haven't created any new datastores, I have re-scanned for any datastores that may be detected, all to no avail.

I have the data that was contained within my VM's, I just dont have the VM's themselves and I would really prefer to somehow get the datastore and the VM's back, rather than creating new VM's.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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4 Replies
a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

If I understand you correctly, you are talking about 1 datastore!? However, the screenshots show 4 individual disks.

How has the datastore been configured initially? Are the 4 disks supposed to be presented as a single LUN from a RAID controller (what type/model), or did you create the datastore using extents?

André

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doreski
Contributor
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Hi Andre,

Yes, it is 1 datastore we are talking about. So, it was setup in RAID 0, with 1 large logical volume (because I needed the storage capacity - we can discuss the pros and cons to that later as I know there really arent a lot of pros) and I did have vmotion setup to migrate the VM's to another datastore.

As fate would have it however, that server with a secondary datastore failed last week, leaving me only a copy of the data inside the VM's of this particular datastore.

The raid controller is HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i from a HP DL360e Gen8 server.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Don't worry, I'm not going to discuss RAID levels. I'm sure that you are well aware of the pros and cons.

This is a Software RAID controller, which required additional software within the operating system. Since VMware doesn't support Software RAID controllers out of the box, but only Hardware RAID controllers like HPE's "P" Models. It looks like you had some kind of additional driver/tool installed, which is now missing!?

The latest driver version that I was able to find on HPE's support web site is one for ESXi 6.5 (https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_5e3c1b48628348de87bd1a07ab).

You could test this driver, but without a backup - that's what I understood - it's risky, so that unless you have a good reason to use ESXi 6.7, you may consider to revert to ESXi 6.5 (using the HPE edition which was most likely used before).

André

doreski
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Andre,

Thank you for the reply.

I will be able to test your suggestion on another machine (funnily enough, same spec machine, just different CPU's) and I will keep you informed. That one is running 6.7.

I just bit the bullet on this particular server and rebuilt it. I had roughly 95% of it backed up, just rebuilding the VM's is pain.

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