Inactive or missing VMware VMFS datastore

Today I came across a situation where one of the shared VMFS datastores in a 4 node ESXi 6.5 cluster was found missing/ inactive after a planned reboot. This post is about the steps I followed to resolve this issue/ re-mount the inactive shared datastore.

On a ESXi node, to list the datastores that are available to mount: esxcfg-volume –l
To mount the available datastore: esxcfg-volume –M <UUID>

Sample screenshot is given below:

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Reference:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2108624-missing-datastore-after-upgrade-from-esxi-6-0-to-6-5

Real time VMware datastore performance monitoring using PowerShell

I had a scenario where we had to monitor the real time performance statistics of multiple shared VMFS datastores which are part of a multi-node VMware ESXi cluster. So this post is about the short script which uses VMware PowerCLI to get read/ write IOPS and latency details of these shared datastores across all nodes in the cluster. The output format is given below which gets refreshed automatically every few seconds.

Prerequisites:

• VMware.PowerCLI module should be installed on the node from which you are running the script
• You can verify using: Get-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -ListAvailable
• If not installed, you can find the latest version from the PSGallery: Find-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI
• Install the module: Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI

Note:

• I am using PowerCLI Version 11.0.0.10380590

Latest version of the project and code available at: github.com/vineethac/datastore_perfmon

Sample screenshot of output:

Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Reference:

https://www.rudimartinsen.com/2017/07/12/vsphere-performance-data-part-3-get-stat/

Configuring ESXI 5.5 server to connect to a iSCSI LUN and mounting it as datastore