First, A little background of my home network; I have a two system network consisting of Dell workstation. The first runs ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and the second runs Open Solaris 2008.05. I utilize the ZFS for both the root and the data drives. I use an NFS share for my ESX datastore. Well today, while working from home, we experienced a brownout and down came both servers and my Vista workstation. I waited to boot the ESXi server until the Solaris box successfully booted. After booting, I started the ESXi server and was greeted by my two VMs stating unknown (invalid).
I tried browsing the datastore and was able to see my VMs. So I thought, OK, I’ll try to remove one of the VMs from inventory and re-import. ESX imported it and lo and behold……. Unknown (invalid). Ok, during this time, I checked my music folder on the workstation, which is an ISCSI mount on the same server. It looked fine. So I rebooted the ESX server to see if that helped. After the reboot, still no dice. I then logged into the Solaris server and decided to reboot it and then the ESXi server again. This time, we had a winner. My VMs were there with the correct names, and I was able to start them up. The VMware lock files were in place and weren’t cleared until after the storage reboot. The next time, I might try to un-mounting the NFS share and remounting.
Live and learn.
Aren’t brownouts fun! Glad you figured it out!