Browsing Posts tagged VMFS

Reading Time: 5 minutesThe VMware ESXi partitions layout on the system disk has remained almost the same for several years. VMware ESXi 6.x partitions layout was the same from previous 5.x versions and there ware only some exceptions with bigger disks (with two different diagnostic partitions. Starting with ESXi 7.0 the partions layout is now totally changed.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI had a lot of trouble with one particular “special” VMDK on a ESXi 6.5 system, which did not start after a reboot of the ESXi host. The VM power-on procedure failed with this message: “File system specific implementation of LookupAndOpen[…] failed”. However in the end it just gave me the overall error that it failed to start the machine.

Reading Time: 4 minutesIf you are running VMware vSphere 5.5 or 6.x you may have some issues with VM snapshots with the risk that VMs may report guest data inconsistencies! Not funny at all and potentially a critical problem that must be planned, considering that VM snapshots are used by all VM native backup products! And more serious that the cosmetic snapshot “issue” in VMware vSphere 6.0 using the vSphere C# Client. This issue is still open for vSphere 5.5 (and probably will remain un-fixed considerind that v5.5 is in End of General Support), 6.0 and 6.5.

Reading Time: 2 minutesRecently I’ve got a strange issue on ESXi 6.0: after an host reboot the ESXi hosts display a false positive warning: Deprecated VMFS volume(s) found on the host. Please consider upgrading volume(s) to the latest version Starting with vSphere 6.0 the VMFS3 version is now deprecated, but in my case all block based datastores were already at VMFS version 5!

Reading Time: 4 minutesIn VMware ESXi the All Paths Down (APD) or Permanent Device Loss (PDL) condition is what occurs on an ESX/ESXi host when a storage device is removed in an uncontrolled manner from the host (or the device fails), and the VMkernel core storage stack does not know how long the loss of device access will last. A typical way of getting into APD would be a Fiber Channel switch failure or (in the case of an iSCSI array) a network connectivity issue. But there are also other scenarios that we will discuss later. VMware vSphere […]

Reading Time: 5 minutesThere are different reason where you can you loose or corrupt your partition table of your VMFS volumes: resignature from another system (for example the backup server, if connected in SAN mode), a human mistake (datastore / delete), or maybe some storage issues. In this case usually the VMFS partition is still there and also the related data: you have “only” to rebuild the right partition table. But this could really simple if you follow the recommended practice to have only one VMFS partition on each disk. In this case you have only to build […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesWith a vSphere 5 upgrade there is an important vDesign decision: if you already have some VMFS3 datastores could be better upgrade them to the new version of build new datastores directly with VMFS5? The upgrade procedure is quite fast and friendly and could be applied to a live datastore, so seems that there isn’t a big different between an upgrade or a clean format. But usually the recommendation is to re-format each LUN to VMFS-5 rather than upgrade it. This will fix a number of issues, including:

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