NVMe datastores disappeared post ESXi FQDN change

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Datastores become inaccessible or disappear at the vSphere level after an ESXi hostname change.

These issues can also occur later if the ESXi host was not rebooted or upgraded following a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) change.

[YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS] Wa(180) vmkwarning: cpu2:2097586)WARNING: NvmeDiscover: 7712: GetIdentifyController failed for controller:nqn.1988-11.com.dell:powerstore:00:7##################2#vmhba64#.#.#.#:4420. status: Invalid or missing namespace
[YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS] Wa(180) vmkwarning: cpu14:2097598)WARNING: NvmeDiscover: 1934: Failed to get valid NS for controller nqn.1988-11.com.dell:powerstore:00:7##################2#vmhba65#.#.#.#:4420
[YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS] In(182) vmkernel: cpu2:2097586)NvmeDiscover: 7555: controller probe failed status:Failure nqn.1988-11.com.dell:powerstore:00:7##################2#vmhba64#.#.#.#:4420
[YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS] Wa(180) vmkwarning: cpu14:2097598)WARNING: NvmeDiscover: 1934: Failed to get valid NS for controller nqn.1988-11.com.dell:powerstore:00:7##################2#vmhba64#.#.#.#:4420
[YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS] Wa(180) vmkwarning: cpu2:2097586)WARNING: NvmeDiscover: 1934: Failed to get valid NS for controller nqn.1988-11.com.dell:powerstore:00:7##################2#vmhba64#.#.#.#:4420
[YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS] Wa(180) vmkwarning: cpu14:2097598)WARNING: NvmeDiscover: 2131: Update controller failed for controller nqn.1988-11.com.dell:powerstore:00:7##################2#vmhba64#.#.#.#:4420. Error on GetIdentifyController, Status: Invalid

Environment

vSphere ESXi 8.X

Cause

ESXi establishes a storage connection via NQN to retrieve namespace information from the storage array. If the ESXi hostname changes and the host is rebooted, the NQN controller names between ESXi and the storage array will also change.

This results in ESXi being unable to fetch the namespace, causing the datastores to become unavailable, even though the controller shows as online.

Resolution

To verify if the hostname on the ESXi host has changed, you can compare the Host NQN with the NQN configured on the storage array. Use the following command on the ESXi host to retrieve the Host NQN:

# zcat /var/log/boot.gz | grep -i "Host NQN"

If the Host NQN differs from the one configured on the storage array, update the storage array with the correct ESXi NQN. Once the NQN has been updated, perform a storage rescan on the ESXi host. The datastores should become visible after the rescan.