Hi All,
I'd really appreciate some help with the following scenario.
I'm still relatively new to ESX and my limited 3 months experience and some trawlling of these forums haven't yet given me the answers to solve my problem. I've got an issue trying to add back 3 VMFS datastores to my ESX servers. A day or so ago, although my most of my VM's were still running - I noticed that if I did a refresh of my storage in the VI Client, I would lose my 3xFC SAN based VMFS storage. Realising this I quickly migrated most of my VM's to another SAN that was freshly setup. Unfortunately, I shut down the remaining servers to migrate and perhaps once VMtools stopped running, I lost the ability to browse the datastore anymore. It's my guess that the partition tables were somehow lost. I'm convinced my VM's are all still there intact.
So far, the steps I have taken are as follows:
I have manually recreated the partition tables using the procedures found in this thread http://communities.vmware.com/message/935007#935007
I have rescanned storage adaptors, and tried to refresh the storage. If I go to "add storage" it can see all 3 vmbha and the next screen says they are all VMFS with no free space. (this sounds right?) Obviously, I don't continue as I don't want to format and lose any data.
I have tried to use the EnableResignature=1 advanced setting and done the scanning all over again.
If there is anything else I could try, please let me know. From what I can see, there are VMFS volumes there and I can see them, but can't add them to an ESX host. Any help is appreciated!!
Thanks, Neil
