Adding an Extent to an existing VMFS volume is not reflected in VI Client.

[ksurya]

HI All,

I am not sure how many of you have faced this scenario.

On storage side we do not have datastores created on a single LUN, instead we have this practice of adding extent to the existing VMFS colume as and when desired. This is not a recommended practice but we do it for our own reasons.

We have ESX 3., VC 2.5 environment with EMC SAN connected to ESX hosts. We come across situations, where we add an extent to say datastoreA but the newly added space would not get reflected in the VI Client.. Here we try to refresh the datastore and try and rescan the LUNs. Sometimes it reflects the correct status and sometimes it reflects the old status. There is an inconsistent behaviour which adds to our problems.

Please suggest a workaround if there is any ....

An SR opened with VMware Support did not work with a reply just that its not recommended. I humbly ask this Q then why do we have the option of adding extents in the first place available in the VI Client??

Thanks in advance to all information shared.

Do let me know if you need any other info.

[ksurya]

Small correction in the problem statement, we try and rescan the HBAs connected to the ESX hosts to see if the correct status is reflected.

Thanks.

[BUGCHK]

> I humbly ask this Q then why do we have the option of adding extents in the first place available in the VI Client??

I agree. Extents are useful in some cases.

There is an unrealistic guideline (requires you to stop everything):

VMKB1884 - Guidelines for Extending a VMFS Volume

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1884

And you could be the victim of a bug:

VMKB1002784 - Free space from an extent added to a VMFS3 datastore is not seen on the other

ESX Server hosts

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002784

[ksurya]

Thank You!!!!

The links u sent had quite a bit of useful information. Appreciate your support.