Add datastore wizard takes a long time to populate available LUNs

Products

• VMware Live Recovery
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

When using the Add storage wizard to create a new VMFS datastore, you experience these symptoms:

• Add storage wizard takes a long time to populate available LUNs for provisioning
• Add storage wizard seems to freeze whilst populating available storage devices

Environment

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.1.x
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0.x
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1

Cause

This issue occurs if there are read only LUNs presented to the ESX/ESXi hosts.

Resolution

This is an expected behavior.

Read only LUNs are typically used for replication purpose and are commonly seen in vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) environments. In a production environment, ESX/ESXi hosts heartbeat all available VMFS volumes, which fails on the read only VMFS LUNs.

In the Add storage wizard, the ESX/ESXi hosts query all available storage to see the devices that are available. If there are read only LUNs that are in a read only state, the scan for available devices take a longer time than expected.

Note: You may set the replicated LUNs into a Not Ready state rather than a read only state. However, running replicated LUNs in a Not Ready state is not recommended by storage vendors.