Datastore missing after ESXi reboots

Alastair Grant | Sunday 8 June 2014

I've been experiencing an annoying issue with my ESXi hypervisor home-server. When the server comes online there are no datastores listed. The volumes are mounted, and the datastore can be remounted with the existing signature. Everything is fine, until the system is rebooted.

Scanning through the logs didn't throw up anything obvious. A few storage related issues seemed to be "normal" according to various forums.

In the end I managed to resolve the issue by remounting the device through the command line. I started by unmounting the datastore through Vsphere and then ran this command to find the datastore:

esxcli storage vmfs snapshot list

Followed by:

esxcli storage vmfs snapshot mount -u [uuid]

Replacing [uuid] with the VMFS UUID from the output of the first command. Rebooting the datastore now persists.

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