What does the (N) when a datastore is viewed in vCenter mean?

[stratolynne]

I hae several datastores that look like this:

DATASTORE_1 (1)

DATASTORE_12 (2)

What does the (N) mean?

[Troy_Clavell]

If these are just vCenter Object names then I would tend to think there are duplicate names in your environment.  Can you go to the inventory view for datastores and see if this is the case?  If you check your ESXi Hosts /vmfs/volumes are the naming conventions different?

[mcowger]

This happens when multiple hosts have a datastore with the same name (MyDatastore, for example) but the datastores are not the same device (e.g. they might be local devices, etc).  To avoid a namespace collision, vCenter renames them.

[cjscol]

I have seen this happen sometimes when you mount a NFS export to multiple hosts but do not enter the NFS server name the same when adding the datastore to each host, e.g.

On host01 you mount /vol/datastore01 from server 10.10.10.10

On host02 you mount /vol/datastore01 from server nas01.mydomain.local

On host03 you mount /vol/datastore01 from server nas01

On host04 you mount /vol/datastore01 from server NAS01.mydomain.loal

Even though nas01 is the same as nas01.mydoman.local and has the IP address 10.10.10.10 it is not always detecetd as being the same datastore so even though you attempted to mount each of them with the name Datastore_1 some have a (1) or maybe (2) or (3) after the name as vCenter thinks they are different datastores so renames them to a unique name.