Newbe: ESXi 6.5 Datastore failure simulation

[ITServ_GmbH]

Hello community members.

I'm new to VMWare, and evaluate the free ESXi to proof my concept of moving to VMWare Essentials.

My server has eight SATA disks, each configured as a singular datastore. I create a guest OS (in my case, Solaris) and assign two virtual disks, each on a different datastore, thus, different physical disk.

Next, I mirror the disks using Solaris Volume Manager. Now I run disk I/O and can clearly see both disks are busy.

Now I'd simulate a fatal disk error by removing a disk, assuming the volume manager will take care of it. To my surprise, VMWare halts the VM. For further surprise, ESXi restarted the VM after some time, which is great for me.

Question 1: How can I influence the time the VM becomes suspended?

I also prepare on read/write errors without having a completely failed disk. For that reason,

Question 2: can I assume a read/write error on a datastore is forwarded to the VM?

Thank you very much.

[Finikiez]

Hi!

Making a single volume inside guest OS using virtual disks on different datastores is a bad idea.

Because by default when VM lose a virtual disk (for examaple datastore failure) it can't boot after that.

There was a KB article about that with same advanced options for old ESXi version.

But I can find it quickly at the moment.

Generally speaking it's highly recommended to avoid such configuration it won't give you any valuable benefit.

[ITServ_GmbH]

Thank you for your input.

However, I came closer to the problem, but I have to re-ask the question in another board, as it's not related to vSphere, but to ESXi.