Help! Production ESXi 5.5 File Server problem

[jaquinn]

Hey all,

I had to restart an R710 running ESXi 5.5 a bit ago. When I brought ESXi back up, the VM is now showing as Unknown, and the datastore that the file server disks are on are showing as Unmounted now.. This host is just running the one VM - and the virtual disks are located on a datastore on their MD3800i, which is still active/on their network because I'm able to start up VMs from another ESXi 6.5 host that they have, which are also stored on the MD3800i.

Still trying to troubleshoot this as we speak. I'm a little in over my head here, so I'd very much appreciate any help. I'm not a complete newbie to ESXi (I'm even running ESXi 6.5 on an R420 at home), but I don't have a whole lot of experience with storage arrays in general.

Thanks.

[dbalcaraz]

Well, first obvious thing.

Did you try to mount again the Datastore?

Did you check in the array if the LUN is present?

Did you check logs in the ESXi host (vmkernel.log)?

[continuum]

First of all check wether the unknown LUN is detected as a snapshot - see VMware Knowledge Base

If it is detected as a snapshot read the instructions for Resignaturing.

If that does not help either the VMFS-volume may be corrupted.

If you provide a VMFS header dump I may be able to extract your VMs manually.

See Create a VMFS-Header-dump using an ESXi-Host in production | VM-Sickbay

Ulli