Alert "All shared datastores failed on the host" is displayed on the vCenter Server UI

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

•  Alert "All shared datastores failed on the host" is displayed in vCenter Server UI in the ESXi host summary page.
• Receiving this alert on our vCenter, not seeing any disconnected DataStore, and we cannot clear this alert.
• The datastores are mounted and accessible
• This is stale message and no real impact is seen at virtual machine or user level.
• The alert reappears even after acknowledging the alarm or set the alarm to green in vSphere client. 
• This can happen in HCI environments like HPE SimpliVity
• In some scenarios the disk size for the VMs residing on this ESXi host might show 0 MB.
• VM snapshot chains and .vmdk descriptors are verified as healthy via vmkfstools -e.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere 8.x

Cause

This alert is triggered during storage issues and the backing devices of the datastores have experienced a PDL

This alert can also be triggered in HCI environments during controller maintenance or upgrades

This alert is the result of a stale entry from "vmware-sps" and the "vpxd" services

Resolution

1. If the alert "All shared datastores failed on the host" is observed 

Restart vCenter Management Services:

service-control --restart vpxd
service-control --restart vmware-sps

2. If the disk size for the VMs show 0 MB along with the alert "All shared datastores failed on the host"

Restart ESXi Management Agents (hostd and vpxa) :

/etc/init.d/hostd restart

/etc/init.d/vpxa restart