Disk not showing under storage device

[curioso]

Hi,

I recently migrated my SAN Disks, which had the ESX Server 3.0.1 installed on it and VM's on the other, from one Storage Server to another Storage Server. I did it successfully and my ESX Server was up and running fine after the SAN Disks migration. But when I open my Virtual Center Client, I noticed that the SAN Disks were not shown under the Storage device. When I click "Add Storage" the disk were there but I can't add it, and the SAN Disk with ESX Server installed on it has the the following error message "Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to update disk partition information". The other SAN Disk with all my VM's on it looks like it's going through but It's trying to re-format the disk, which I don't want to do because I'm going to lost all my VM's on it. Is there any other way to add my SAN Disks as a Storage Device without reformatting it. And also what causes the errror message above?

Thanks,

[dominic7]

Dumb question, but have you refreshed the view of the storage?

[curioso]

Dumb answer. Of course, i did everything possible ways to add a storage within the Virtual Center client.

[depping]

maybe you could try to use the enable/disable snapshot volume?

sorry i mean, EnableResignature, or check out this post: http://communities.vmware.com/message/258751

it tells you how to recreate a vmfs partition without formatting it!

Duncan

[dominic7]

So since the obvious is out of the way. Let's try to find out where the disconnect really is.

1. Do the SAN volumes actually show up as partitioned on the server in question?

#> sfdisk -l /dev/sdX

Where X is the device in question. This will print out a partition table for the LUN. You should see 1 partition that spans the entire LUN ( unless you went out of your way to do something else with it ) and it should have a partition type of fb.

Next, assuming that your partition information looks right. You might want to restart your vmware management agent on the afflicted server. Note that if this is an unpatced 3.0.1 installation and you've got auto-start/shutdown turned on, it will restart all your VMs due to a bug. Once the management agent restarts ( the command is "service mgmt-vmware restart" ), try disconnecting and reconnecting the host. Then look at your storage and see if it's cleared up.