ESXi 6.0 not recognizing disk

[bwilsey84]

I have a 6.0 Update 2 host and we attached a 4TB disk with 2 TB of data on it via a USB adapter. The disk is VMFS, and in order for the disk to show up I had to stop the usb arbitrator service on the host. Now that is shows up in vSphere it shows that it's 0GB.. The goal was to plug this drive in and use it as a datastore while I clone/copy the VM's on it to the host's real datastore. When I plug the drive in direct to sata on a computer I can see the partitions not necessarily the data but I know its there.

[bwilsey84]

Anyone have any clues as to why it see's the disk but not the VMFS on it?

[Finikiez]

Hi!

Esxi can detect existing VMFS as a snapshot.

Run the command

esxcli storage vmfs snapshot list

if it's detected as snapshot you need to mount it.


Read more in the following KB article VMware Knowledge Base

[bwilsey84]

After reading the article and running the command I still get nothing, Its a fresh host with nothing on it. However reading the article shows that the mounted disk is detectable as a LUN, this disk wont even show up as a LUN when trying to creating a new datastore from it. all I can really see is that its a non SSD drive, attached via USB and it says 0GB Capacity (I think thats why it wont show as a LUN).

[Gidrakos]

Have you formatted the disk by the actual host? Disks come 100% blank, without anything written to them, so VMware is probably being told by the host that it has a disk plugged in, but has no idea about anything else since it's completely void.

[bwilsey84]

This is a disk from a seperate ESXi host, it was given to me and I was told it is about 2TB worth of VM's so its formatted as VMFS. When i personally plugged it in to a windows machine I was able to see the 2TB partition.

[a_p_]

Some questions:

• What exact vendor/model of HDD is it (see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2091600)?
• What was the ESXi version/build of the host on which the datastore has been created?
• In case of ESXi 6.5, has it been formatted as a VMFS5, or VMFS6 datastore?
• Does the disk, and its partition show up under /vmfs/devices/disks/ ?
• If yes, does partedUtil getptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/<diskid> show the expected output?

You mentioned that you attached the disk to a Windows system!? Not a good idea, because Windows tends to resignature disks unless Automount is disabled.

André

[bwilsey84]

Its a western digital 3.0 NASware 3.5in drive. Unfortunately im not sure what version or build the original host was. It was shipped to us by some contractor lab. Additonally this isnt the original that was shipped. It was cloned from a SSD.

Glad I didnt attach the original to a windows system, however the folks that cloned the original may have attached it, because it was basically sent here and they had to decode what it even was. They were just told heres a drive with this "kit" on it. And they werent told anything else.

Sorry im fairly new to VMware, when Im ssh into the host as root I dont have access to /vmfs/devices/disks

[a_p_]

Please see whether you get an output from

ls -lisah /vmfs/devices/disks/

and paste the text output to a reply post (please resize the ssh/putty screen to avoid line breaks in the output)..

In addition to this run

grep -i mismatch /var/log/vmkernel.log

to see whether there's it shows s.th. like "LVM major version mismatch".

André

[bwilsey84]

Well i stepped away and decided to direct attach instead of using the usb bridge, it worked fine, as soon as I opened up the server and found a free SATA the disk showed all the good info and im transferring vm's right now.

Thanks for all your help and insight.