Inaccessible datastores : is there a risk ?

[sbmk]

Hi,

Because of some electrical maintenance, we will have to shut down half of our VMware infrastructure.

I  have already migrated the required VMs (storage and CPU) on the remaining servers and bays.

So is there any trouble to expect if we simply shut down two members of the cluster (put into maintenance mode) and a bay (Compellent)  holding volumes accessed by the whole cluster ? There will only be registered but stopped VMs on it.

Regards 

[asajm]

Hi @sbmk 

According to the explanation you mentioned, you will not have any issues.

[sbmk]

Thank you for your answer.

Of course, the disconnected datastores will be impacted by a PDL  as the storage will be switched off for some time (the maintenance is supposed to last almost one day).

Do you think I should also disable HA ?

It is not clear to me if PDL conditions will cause VMs to restart, and I don't want to take the risk of having our running VMs restarting.

And when it is over, is there anything special to do or will the datastores simply become available when the bay is up ? I neved tried that before !

Regards

[nachogonzalez · Accepted solution]

Hey, hope you are doing fine:


If the VMs on those datastores are powered off you should not have any issues BUT, to be sure:
- For HA datastore heartbeating you can configure it to use the datastores that will be available.
- After you shut down the storage, you can rescan the storage on the esxi hosts to avoid that PDL from hanging the hostd service (I've seen failing storage to hang a esxi host in the past)

Hope that works. 

[sbmk]

Thank you too ! I will be better when this is over 🙂

I had a look at this document : https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-C32CA9C2-278F-4B53...

So it is not mandatory to follow everything written here ? Seems to be the logical and clean way, but to be honest, it will be a hassle to unregister/register dozens of VMs, and put them back in the correct folders without forgetting only one 🙂

I have just umounted the empty datastores, so I will leave other things as they are and rescan to storage on the remaining hosts and hope for the best !

Regards

[nachogonzalez]

Why don't you backup the locaitons with RVTools?