SvSAN Datastore Inaccessible and VMs Invalid After Power Outage

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After a power outage, ESXi hosts fail to mount the SvSAN datastore, leaving VMs in an "Invalid" state. The datastore is physically accessible on the host, but the VMs show an invalid state.

Environment

ESXi 8.x

Cause

The power outage caused the SvSAN appliance to shut down improperly. Upon reboot, the appliance VMs failed to power on due to stale .lck files, which prevented the SvSAN service from restoring the datastore's paths and making it accessible to the ESXi hosts.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, orphaned .lck files must be manually removed from the SvSAN appliance VMs' directories. This action allows the appliance VMs to power on, which then restores access to the datastore and resolves the invalid state of the VMs. See: Troubleshooting issues resulting from locked virtual disks