So I had an inactive datastore listed on a blade server (I see the other disks on the internal SAS controller which is in an external diskshelf) besides my regular one. I deleted it, got the error message that the VMFS cannot be updated since the LUN is gone, and after it it shows me two other datastores now – but they are empty. It's running ESXi 4.1.
Could I have somehow caused any of that to be deleted?
I think the answer is no, since if I were to delete a datastore, it would have physically erased the VMFS partition signature at the drive, thus, instead of it being empty, it wouldn't even show up. when I did delete the inactive one and it didn't find the LUN, it just did a rescan, and the other VMFSs showed up, since others are using them with VMware also on the same bladecenter.
Is this correct?
Best Answer
I think you're exactly right in your thinking on what happened - the new, empty ones just showed up because the remove triggered a rescan.
If the old datastore was showing as grayed out/italic text, then it was disconnected -- removing that wouldn't have any impact on other LUNs, and certainly wouldn't format anything back to a fresh VMFS partition.