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rulmer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Error creating datastore in ESXi

Hello all.

I am new to vSphere and got myself into trouble trying to migrage from ESXi 4.1 to vSphere Hypervisor v5.0.

The servers I'm using are Dell Poweredge R300s with two WD1602 hard drives installed. I am booting from a USB stick.

I sucessfully updated from 4.1 to 5.0 but saw that the datastores I had were type: VMFS3 and I wanted to update them to VMFS5. I deleted the datastores and when I attempted to recreate them, I get an error: Call "HostDatastoreSystem.CreateVmfsDatastore" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "Host Name" failed."

There is a related KB article (1037925) but it relates to LUNs on a Dell storage array, not internal disks. There also appears to be a vCLI fix shown, but again it is targeted at the storage array and I'm not sure if it will work with the local hard drives and / or how I would modify the command to work with them.

I downloaded and installed the power CLI utility but don't know enough about it to do what I need to do.

I have three servers to upgrade. One has not been touched (i.e., still at v4.1), one has been updated to v5.0 but the VMFS is still at VMFS3 with the original datastores in tact, and one been updated to v5.0, had the datastores deleted and I can no longer add them back in. I've tried reverting back to v4.1 on that server, but I still get the error listed.

Can anyone please give me some guidance on how to either reformat / repartition the drives in question to eliminate the LUN entries (I'm assuming based on the KB article above...) or guide me with the appropriate CLI commands to accomplish this?

Also, is there any way to convert from VMFS3 to VMFS5 without deleting / dismounting the drives? Any suggestions there would be helpful as well.

Thank you in advance for all help.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

To upgrade from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 you just need to select a datastore in the Configuration --> Storage tab and click the "Upgrade to VMFS-5..." link.

Regarding the non working host. If you don't have any other datastores on this host, consider to reinstall it. If there's data on it that you still need and/or you want to recover the VMFS datastore, please explain exactly how the system (disks/RAID/datastores) looks like.

André

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rulmer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Andre',

Thank you for the reply.

I looked all over for the upgrade to VMFS-5 link and could not find it.

The KB article pointed to having entries in the LUN table or already being assigned a LUN.

Unfortunately, I spent way too much time on this and ended up booting the server up with a Windows 7 install disk, running the disk partition software on it to delete the partitions on the hard drives and then went back and reinstalled the vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) v5 after that.

Part of the problem was that I could not delete the partition that had the system log file location installed on it, and without being able to remove that, I could not delete the partition from within the ESXi environment.

After I had the server think it had no partitions on it (Windows installer didn't care or need the system log partitions so it let me delete it without questioning why. Actually didn't even want me to confirm it....) adding new datastores was no problem. I could pick VMFS 3 or VMFS 5.

Again, thank you for taking the time to reply.

Regards,

Bob

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

You are welcome.

Just in case you ever need to upgrade another VMFS partition, take a look at e.g. http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/08/2tb-vmdks-on-upgraded-vmfs-3-to-vmfs-5-really.html (Step 3) to see where the "Upgrade to VMFS-5" link is located.

André

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rulmer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Andre',

I think I see where the problem is....

I am not running vSphere server to manage the servers, only the client. The screen shots shown in the link you added are far more detailed than what I see running the Hypervisor (i.e., ESXi / free version).

Hopefully my post was not located in an inappropriate place in the tech community.

Bob

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ealaqqad
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have faced this same problem in my lab few days back. Hit this forum post & found no resolution so saved it so I can post the resolution when I find it.

That seems to normally happen if your LUN has some file system that it can not understand or modify. Previous to vSphere 5.x you were to use fdisk to fix it in 5.x & above you would use PartedUtil. You can all find more details on this at: http://www.virtualizationteam.com/virtualization-vmware/vsphere-virtualization-vmware/call-hostdatas...

Hope this help!

Regards,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

B: http://www.Virtualizationteam.com

B: http://www.TSMGuru.com

Regards, Eiad Al-Aqqad Technology Consultant @ VMware b: http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com b: http://www.TSMGuru.com
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