Esxi not mounting datastore

[amateur]

When I first setup esxi I had one server grade hdd for the esxi then a separate WD red nas hdd for all my vms. They are connected to a raid controller. I plan to buy another wd nas hdd then setup raid. It was working great till all of a sudden the wd hdd decided to become a raid forign drive out of the blue. I had to clear the drive then reregister as a virtual drive in the dell raid configuration utility.
However for some reason esxi won't mount the datastore thats on the wd hdd. I have to manually use esxcfg-volume -l and then esxcfg-volume -m. then do a rescan for datastores. Rescan for datastores does nothing without manually mounting the datastore using esxcfg-volume. When I do the rescan after using esxcfg-volume, all my vm's become availible. As soon as I reboot Esxi , its then back to square one.
any ideas why?

 

[Captain Lukey]

I think this may be down to a duplicate issue maybe with the old UUID or signature. I had an issue and fixed it with esxcfg-volume -M ....VOLUME-NAME.... makes it persistent . Note its a capital -M

 

[amateur]

Hi
i tried your command but it still doesn't mount the datastore automatically on start up

 

[TRACKER]

I think you need first to resignature it, using 'esxcli storage vmfs snapshot resignature -u some_long_id'
i remember i had to do that before mounting with option '-M'

 

[amateur]

esxcli storage vmfs snapshot resignature -u 5533cac7-b8ff24c2-0539-001ec9d5
b1d0
~ # esxcfg-volume -l

Hi i resigned the datastore but now it has completely disappeared. When I do esxcfg-volume -l it shows nothing.
The esxcli storage vmfs snapshot resignature -u command doesn't give me a new ID. Also doing a rescan for datastore doesn't do anything

What shud I do now?

 

[TRACKER]

Back then when i had that issue i followed this article:

Troubleshooting LUNs detected as snapshot LUNs in vSphere

knowledge.broadcom.com

Perhaps you should do the following:
To view the datastores again in vCenter Server, you may have to perform a rescan of the storage adapters on all ESXi hosts that the datastore is presented to or a refresh of the storage view. If you are having trouble identifying the affected datastore, in the vSphere client, check the storage view of another ESXi host that still has the datastore mounted correctly. This will then allow you to correlate VMFS datastore name with NAA LUN identifier.

 

[amateur]

Hi
The rescan for datastore menu option is unhelpful as it doesn't tell you if it has added datastores. I suspect it did add my datastore but my vms were still unavailble. I went to the storage screen on vsphere and saw my datastore has reappeared but my vm's were still inaccessible.
So I tried deleting them from the host then readding them. This worked and the vm's are still working after I reboot esxi.

Thanks alot Tracker.