Storage device becomes permanently lost while SCSI reservation is held by ESXi

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

You receive the following event message when a storage device containing a datastore becomes permanently unavailable to the ESXi host as a result of a permanent loss:

Device :device has been removed or is permanently inaccessible while holding a reservation.

The message indicates that the permanent device loss occurred while the device was reserved for exclusive use by the ESXi host.

Impact

When a permanent device loss occurs during a datastore operation that requires a SCSI reservation, the operation fails and the datastore becomes unavailable. ESXi marks the device as not connected and a warning about the device being permanently unavailable appears in the VMkernel log file.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0

Resolution

Power down and unregister any virtual machines that use the inaccessible datastore.

Before unmounting the datastore from ESXi, break the device lock by running the following command:

vmkfstools -B --breaklock device_path

For more information, see Knowledge Base article 2004684.