I have implemented a 3 node VSAN cluster (all Flash/SSD) configuration running on HP DL 360 G9..
During a maintenance windows, we restarted and the ESXi hosts and re-started the VMs, but one of the VM failed to restart with this error:
"/vmfs/volumes/vsan:5226xxxx/d9d-xxx-xxx/Cxxxx.vmdk was not found. An error was received from ESX host while powering on Cxxxx (the VM). Failed to start the virtual machine. Module disk power on failed. cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/vsan:5226xxxx/d9d-xxx-xxx/Cxxxx.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. The system cannot find the specified VMware ESX cannot find the virtual disk '/vmfs/volumes/vsan:5226xxxx/d9d-xxx-xxx/Cxxxx.vmdk' Verified the path is valid and try again."
I checked the VM's folder but the .vmx file cannot be found. As I cannot troubleshoot further from I decided to delete the VM from disk and redeployed from template and performed a reconfiguration from scratch. I have no particular answer to the cleint why this happened and what to do to mitigate it nect time.
Again at another occasion, 2-3 week later, I did patches updates on the 3 ESXi hosts and it was successfully done. But except when i restarted multiple VMs at the same time, 3 of them failed as the VMs configuration files locked up. I said okay this an easy one to fix, so i decided to remove the VMs from inventory and re added them to inventory but I was shocked when i discovered that one of the VMs has disappeared that I could not find the folder even the reference ID folder all disappeared from the vSAN provisioned distributed datastore.
I check on the event log and I can confirm that I did perform a 'remove from inventory' task on this particular VM as did for the other two VMs that were okay. Where could the VM's folder have disappeared to?
I have sinced recreated the VMs by cloning a closely related VMs,
Can someone, may be who have had this experience before, help to explain why this happened as the client is starting to loose confidence in VSAN?
What is configured:
- 3 - node Cluster with all flash/SSD vSAN
- Horizon view virtual desktop configuration
- vSphere 6
- Horizon View 6.2
- vSAN 6.1