Tuesday, October 23. 2012

HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions

I was having problems with getting a VMWare ESXi 5.1 Host to register properly with vSphere 5.0 (probably something seriously wrong with that whole concept all by itself). During the install of ESXi 5.1, the local drives were attached and formatted for vmfs capability.

Since I couldn't fix the registration problem, I rolled the host back to ESXi 4.1. When it came time to reformat and make the drives useful for vmfs, I encountered an error along the lines of:


VMware: Call "HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions" 
  for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "SERVERNAME" failed

The comments of VMPros Virtualization provided the solution (with an enhancement included by someone in the comments):

I just did a .ls /vmfs/devices/disks/. from the shell to identify what was the vml I had to use.
To find the vml I just ran the following command .partedUtil get /vmfs/devices/disks/VMLID. and I got an error with the VMLID corresponding to the new drive.
After that, I just ran your .dd if=/dev/zero of=./vmfs/devices/disks/VMLID. bs=512 count=34 conv=notrunc. and I was able to add the hard drive.