Unable to browse vVOL Datastore from ESXI Shell

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• Unable to browse or list the content of a vVOL datastore through the shell.
• Using "ls" in an ESXi shell might cause ESXi to be stuck for a long time to list the directories in a vVOL datastore.

 

Environment

esxi 7.x

esxi 8.x

Cause

This is a limitation as per design. Accessing a vVOL datastore from ESXi Shell, is different from how VMFS can be accessed.

vVOL the datastore directory is a folder that will dynamically mount config vVOLs as sub-folders as needed. The config vVOLs each contain a VMFS filesystem and normally maps to a VM home folder.

Using "ls" to list the content of a vVOL datastore would try to bind all the config vVOLs in the datastore. An "ls" can make the ESXi shell non responsive and can cause issues with ongoing vVOL workloads on the ESXi host when a vVOL datastore holds many VMs.

Resolution

Use "/usr/lib/vmware/osfs/bin/osfs-ls" command to list the content of vVOL datastores. 

'osfs-ls' is an alternative utility program to browse an object storage datastore (i.e., vVOL datastores) without impacting ESXi performance.

 

Additional Information

Q: Is there a way to mount a vVol from the esxcli command? (Page7)

Depends. Config vVols can be “mounted” (bound) by accessing it through osfs (regular ‘ls’ into the path of the config vVol) but other vVol types aren’t accessible that way.