So a few things have happened recently and I’ve made a few executive decisions in regards to my home network. I’ll make a post about these at a later stage but in the process I require a boot drive for a new piece of hardware I got my hands on and I have a suitable SSD sitting on my ESXi Server not doing much.
I went to go delete the SSD and I got this odd error!
I have never seen this when I have deleted data-stores in the past, so I had to invoke the google-fu skills.
From This Blog he suggested that its due to the location of the scratch files! I decided to investigate if the scratch files are located on the SSD and apparently it is.
I also confirmed this in the advanced settings oh the host and the destination drive matches the value in the settings.
To try fix this I am going to change the data-store ID to a different data-store that is not going to be doing much. I tried to just copy paste the new data-store ID in and that failed (assumed because the folder did not exist), so I made a new folder with the exact name and that completed with no issue! To apply the change I need to restart the ESXi host.
After the restart I was still unable to still remove the data-store… perhaps the log files are the problem so i need to look at changing the data-store location for that.
Found the (perhaps) culprit setting ‘Syslog.global.logDir’ and changed it to the other data-store with the scratch partition via the Data-store name.
This worked and I was able to unmount the data-store! And then was able to delete it as well. Thanks to configuring the remote raid console as well I was able to unmount my drive while the system was live!
This was a neat error to run into and was not to hard to fix, I am pleased I did not need to just powercli force it so thats good.
VMware KB scratch article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1033696
Spicework syslog log dir article: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1944010-errors-when-attempting-unmount-or-delete-on-a-local-storage-datastore
Scratch blog idea: http://adminotes.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/vmware-remove-datastore-problem.html
Emu Wars 