Right click on the datastore object and choose Delete, right? Wrong.
Following are two good VMware articles outlining the correct procedure for removing datastores in a vSphere environment:
- Best Practice: How to correctly remove a LUN from an ESX host
- Detaching a datastore or storage device from multiple ESXi 5.0 hosts
http://bit.ly/wAaDdj Hi- This post made it to the VMware Global Alliances weekly network news round up.
Thank you for your great content!
So what is happening when I just right click and delete a datastore? I don’t notice any adverse effects to the environment when doing this, nor do I see anything in the various logs.
I am using the LUN removal checklist now, but I’m just curious as to what the Right Click->Delete option on a datastore is there for, if one shouldn’t use it. If removing a datastore in this way is bad practice, then it seems like VMware is encouraging bad practices just by having this option present.
I just did the same mistake.
the adverse effects when removing (unmapping) a lun from an unproperly detatched datastore, are that you get path errors and time-outs on each hosts. if you do a rescan a that moment, the managment interface may get lost and will not respond. (but the vm still continue to run)
The only thing that works is a host hard reboot.