Why are some virtual machines using storage on multiple datastores?

[thinks2much2]

I'm new here, so apologies if this is an obvious question.

I'm using vSphere Enterprise with two ESXi 4.0 hosts and vCenter 4.0. I have 4x datastores on an iSCSI SAN. I've been using Storage vMotion to move the location of my virtual machines between datastores (and in the process also convert them to thin provisioned disks).

After this process several virtual machines are listed as taking up disk resources on multiple datastores. When I check the datastores using datastore browser however, i do not see any evidence of disk space being used. In fact one of the datastores is completely empty (nothing shown from the datastore browser) but if i check in vSphere Client > Datastores > Virtual Machines, I see 6 VMs listed.

None of the VMs have any snapshots(to the best of my knowledge) and all of the VMs are configured to use the default Swapfile location (in case that is relevant).

What crucial piece of information am I missing?

Thanks for any help / pointers.

Kevin

[Penic_Albin]

Did you try to refresh information? Try to restart client also you should try to restart vCenter service.

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[thinks2much2]

I eventually resolved the problem, firstly several VMs had ISO images mounted which caused the VMs to be using multiple datastores. However, this wasn't the entire problem. Even after removing all the ISO mounts, several VMs still continued to use two datastores, and I also saw a linked clone error as described here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1291181

As in that post, shutting down the vm, removing it from the inventory and then re adding it to the inventory resolved the problem.

Kevin