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dougdavis22
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NFS/NAS Datastore Inactive after FreeNas Applicance Reboot

I've got an NFS mount exported on a FreeNAS virtual appliance, and all my ESX hosts have had this configured and working as a datastore fine. Today I had a need to reboot the FreeNAS appliance, after which the datastore went 'Inactive' on all of the ESX hosts.

I logged onto the Service Console of one of the hosts, and couldn't browse to the datastore there either. I've also tried an esxcfg-nas -r with no luck. The only way I can seem to get the thing working on a host again is to remove & re-add the NFS datastore, which is going to be a real pain on a lot of hosts.

Anyone know why this has happened, how I can get it working again easily and how I can avoid it happening in future?

Thanks,

Doug.

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raadek
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I am not familiar with FreeNAS, yet it seems that the appliance have changed some NFS share parameters during reboot on its side.

I believe this is device-specific, as other NAS products (e.g. NetApp) do not suffer from that issue.

Regards.

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dougdavis22
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Nothing has changed on the NFS side of things - the share is still configured exactly as it was prior to the reboot. ESX can see the mount & even thinks it's mounted - if I do an esxcfg-nas -l, it shows the mount as expected. However, I can't navigate to it at the command line (cd /vmfs/volumes/nfs_datastore) and the VI client says it's inactive.

If something had changed on the appliance, I'd expect to not be able to reconnect to the share at all.

Doug.

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sicoffey
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Hey Doug,

Just wondering if you got to the bottom of this, I have the exact same issue with a NFS datastore (QNAP NAS). All works just fine until the connection to the NAS is lost. Whilst I'm happy to accept that this would cause some serious issues with the ESX host, I would expect some form of recovery once the NAS was reachable again - e.g. after NAS reboot. However I see the same as you - the datastore isn't usable (despite esxcfg-nas saying it is mounted). Only resolution I have found so far is rebooting ESX.

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dougdavis22
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I actually gave up using FreeNAS and moved to a Windows 2003 R2 Server running Microsoft Services for Unix. Works a treat, and so far even a reboot of it doesn't cause the same problem.

Doug.

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