Storage device is permanently lost with no open connections

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

You receive the following event message when a storage device becomes permanently unavailable to the ESXi host as a result of a permanent device loss:

Permanently inaccessible device :device has no more open connections.

This indicates that the device has no more open connections or pending I/O. You can now safely unmount any datastores deployed on the device and detach the device. It can happen due to loss of Storage connectivity or loss Storage Device  ( due to unamp / unregister on storage level etc.) 

Impact

ESXi unmaps the datastores and are no longer available to the host or virtual machines running on the host. Subsequent rescans remove the paths and datastores associated with the storage if the datastore is not open.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Resolution

Unregister any virtual machines using the inaccessible datastore.

Then, unmount the datastore from ESXi.

For more information, see Knowledge Base article Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and All-Paths-Down (APD) in vSphere ESXI.