Hi folks,
two weeks ago we had an incident on a Dell server running ESXi 5.1.0
Basically after a reboot the ESXi told us that there were no persistent datastores and prompted us to create a new one.
BEfore the reboot we had 3:
one local, one on the network shared via NFS and one through iSCSI (via IP addresses)
None of them were reachable/visible by the ESXi host and on the left panel all the VMs were listed as unreachable. The configuration files were stored locally.
Who helped us recovering the situation said that since the server's name on which the NFS volume is was not reachable, then it was not mounted and the other either.
Afaik we don't store any configuration data on such NFS volume so I'd like to know from people who are more expert than me on VMware if this look logic to them.
Personally I tried to recreated the situation on another ESXi and I got what expected. I denied any name resolution (both via DNS queries and local resolution on /etc/hosts) and only the NFS volule was not mounted.
Has anyone experienced the same or knows that it might happen under some circumstances? Is there any order for datastore initialization and the failure of one can prevents the other to be mounted?
Many thanks in advance to whom may help in clarifying this,
Alex