Apologies as this is a long story, we originally had 3 HP blades (BL25p) running ESX 3.0 connected via fibre channel to an EVA6000, we created a 2 TB VMFS volume made up of two 1 TB LUN extents labelled "SANStore". We later added two more blades (v3.5) but for the life of me could not get them to see the "SANStore" Volume, I assumed I had some sort of compatability issue and I posted messages in this forum but never did get a resolution.
Later we had to reboot one of the first 3 ESX 3.0 blades and when it came back "SANStore" had disapeared. Again I couldn't find a way to get the host to see it no matter what I tried, at this stage, we added more storage to the SAN and created some new LUN's to migrate all the machines off the "SANStore" spanned volume.
at the same time we have upgraded 2 of the original 3 first ESX host's to 3.5, after the upgrade nether of these hosts could see the storage.
Anyway I got to the point where I had one last VM running on "SANStore", last night I went to migrate it to another LUN so I could get rid of "SANStore", however the wierdest thing happened, as soon as I shut down the VM Guest the "SANStore" volume disapeared of that host, I first noticed when I went to migrate the VM it said that it couldn't find the files, I double clicked the "SANStore" on the host and it comes up blank, I logged into the service console on the host as root and tried to drill down through /vmfs but it doesn't exist only the link that used to point to it is still there.
So I now have no host that can access the volume although all of the host's can actually see the two LUN's that make up the volume (from VC i go to configuration, storage adaptors, I can see the LUN's if I click on ether VMHBA). Rescan comes back with nothing.
It sounds crazy but it is as though somehow the last VM guest was hanging on to the VMFS Volume, as soon as I shut it down it disappeared.
Does anyone know exactly how vmfs3 works, are there any tools that can view the header on the disk? I really need to recovor that one VM, if I could at least copy the VMDK file somewhere I'd be very happy.