Start VM if vdisk is inaccessible

[Marcus Erfurth]

Hi folks,

I got a VM which has several vdisks attached. The vdisks are spread across different VMFS datastores.

If one vdisk is inaccessible, because the datastore is down (because of backend SAN storage is down , e.g. due to power outage) it is not possible to power on the VM, even if the vdisk that holds the booting OS is still accessible as it resides on different datastore. 

It fails with: 

Unable to access virtual disk 'Hard disk 3' from the host. Either the host is disconnected from the datastore or has insufficient privilege. Details: Unable to access file

How can I force the VM to start anyway? This is crucial to us. It does not matter if one vdisk is not accessible, the guest os will handle that.

This is also a problem in an HA scenario as the VM cannot be restarted on remaining hosts due to this error.

Thx,

Marcus

[SimonShaw]

You could try making a blank VM with same specs and attach the C: disk to it and try powering on.

[Marcus Erfurth]

Hi SimonShaw,

yes I guess that would work.

But my main concern is in a high availability scenario when I want an automated way to start the VM on a remaining host which is seems not possible if one of the vdisk is not accessible.

Marcus

[SimonShaw]

You could maybe script something but this sounds like a "bad idea"