Verifying that hosted virtual machine storage is accessible

Products

• VMware
• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article guides you determining if the storage system on which your virtual machine files reside is accessible. If the storage system becomes unavailable, unexpected behaviour may occur including the virtual machines fail to power on, the guest operating system fails, or applications in the guest operating system fail to work.

Symptoms:

• Cannot power on a virtual machine.
• Guest operating system fails or stops responding.
• Guest operating system application fails to work.
• Guest operating system file copy or move operation fails.
• Guest operating system disk related error.

Resolution

To determine if the storage system on which your virtual machine files reside is accessible:

1. Determine the location of all of your virtual machine files. For more information, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files (1003880) .
   
   
2. Navigate to the virtual machine file location and confirm if you can see the files.
   
   Note: If you have virtual machine resources located in more than one location repeat step 1 for each location.
   
   Note: If a storage system is unavailable, you experience different symptoms depending on which virtual machine resource is located on that storage system.
   
3. Confirm that you are able to create a new file in that location.
   
   Note: If you can view existing files but you can't create a new file, you are not logged in as a user with the correct permissions to the directory or the directory permissions have changed. For more information, see Investigating power on permissions for hosted virtual machines (1003847).
   
   Note: Delete the new file after you have created it.