Failed to expand multi-extent VMFS datastore

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• Adding additional extents to a multi-extent datastore fails.
• For one of the existing datastore extents the following may be reported in the vSphere Client:

[esx.problem.vmfs.extent.offline] An attached device naa.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:1 may be offline. The file system [VOLUME-NAME, VOLUME-UUID] is now in a degraded state. While the datastore is still available, parts of data that reside on the extent that went offline might be inaccessible.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.x

 

Cause

This issue may occur when a storage extent goes offline, but the datastore's configuration still refers to it.

• Output of the command vmkfstools -Ph -v10 /vmfs/volumes/DATASTORE_NAME/ shows the following information:

An attached device naa.##################:1 may be offline. The file system [DATASTORE_NAME, UUID] is now in a degraded state. While the datastore is still available, parts of data that reside on the extent that went offline might be inaccessible.
Error
MM/DD/YYYY, HH:MM:SS AM
FQDN
esx.problem.vmfs.extent.offline

 

Resolution

• Restore the ESXi host's access to the missing extent.
  • The device may have been inadvertently unmapped from the ESXi host, or it might not be accessible at a storage level. Work with storage team/storage vendor as required.

• If access to the extent cannot be recovered:
  • Restore the VMs from backup to a new datastore or an alternative datastore.
  • You may attempt to storage vMotion VMs from the datastore.
  • Note: However, if a VM has data on the missing extent, the migration will fail and the migration attempt may cause the VM to go offline. If the migration fails, VMs will need to be restored from backup.   

For more information, see; VMFS extent Offline, causing VMs and Hostd go unresponsive