2K8 servers missing drives after VM HW upgrade

[burdweiser]

So my host upgrades went fine. My VMtools upgrade went fine. Not so for the VM hardware upgrade.

So now I come into work this morning and all of the Windows 2008 guest servers that had more than one drive, the drives are disconnected within windows. I have to rescan for them to pick up. This caused a hugh problem for many of my servers. I have not seen this issue come up before. Did I miss something during the upgrade? Is there any "mass" way to add all of the drives back to the servers within windows?

[burdweiser]

So I had a chat with support today. I was told that this is a known issue! AAHHH! I was told this issue is just the nature of Windows 2008. I'm still waiting on the tech to send me the KB article that was published last month. I would have planed my deployment of vSphere a little bit different had I known of this issue. Well, at least this was only a test cluster with 50 VM's. I have to figure out what I can do for my production and DEV environments.

The work around: You have to log into every 2008 server (only 2K8 is effected), go into windows disk mangler and set the drives as online. You will see them as offline.

Where is the love VMware? I need to know these bugs before I go deploying stuff. I'm surprised I have not seen more complaints on this subject!

[VMjkasalVM]

Yup ran into the exact same issue after a HW upgrade on 2K8. I even ran into an issue updating the VMware tools in windows Server 2008 64bit. I had to manually force an uninstall and then manually reinstall the tools.

Here is the link to the thread that discusses that part.... http://communities.vmware.com/message/1285631#128563.

Sorry slight tangent there... Back to the issue at hand, did the Techs ever send you that KB article?

Thanks

[george_skj]

In Windows 2008 EE/DE data drives are missing after upgrade:

This error is not because of any bug in VM hardware ver 7.

The solution is :

Change the SAN policy in Windows 2008 EE/DE to OnlineAll.

Steps:

1. Log on to the VM as administrator

2. Type Diskpart and Enter

3. Type SAN and Enter(which shows the current Policy)

4. Type SAN POLICY=OnlineAll and Enter. This will set the SAN policy

5. Exit from Diskpart

Hope this helps.

Geo.

VCP

[Rumple]

the reason the disks go offline is because the scsi controller is updated and the disks are re-detected. As indicated here, newly detected disks (which happens during hardware upgrades) causes the drives to show up as offline by default to avoid problems with clustered environments.

http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2009/01/14/adding-a-new-disk-to-an-existing-windows-2008-cl...

[george_skj]

On Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, the default SAN policy is OfflineShared. On all other Windows Server 2008 editions, the default SAN policy is OnlineAll. So this problem will be experienced only on Windows 2008 EE/DE.