I'm facing an issue with my Dell storage setup where one of the LUNs has suddenly become inaccessible. This LUN is connected to multiple vSphere hosts managed by vCenter. Everything was running smoothly until one day, the LUN showed as full capacity and all the VMs hosted there became completely stuck. I tried increasing the storage capacity on the storage side and rescanning the LUN in vCenter, but the rescan got stuck. I then removed the VMs from this LUN, but it subsequently disappeared from the vCenter storage list. When I tried re-adding the LUN to vCenter, I noticed it had lost its metadata. Now, I'm unable to add or view the VMs that were previously running on it. Any advice?
1 Answer
It sounds like you accidentally removed the VMs from inventory instead of migrating them, which might have caused vCenter to lose the pointers to the data. I recommend powering down each host that ever accessed that LUN and then rescanning them one at a time. After that, you can re-register the .vmx files from the datastore browser because the data should still be intact, but it might just seem homeless right now.
Can you explain this process in more detail? I'd like to understand better.