VMFS Volume is locked

This is an unusual situation that I came across today, the exact issue that I faced was related to an issue with a Riverbed Steelfusion appliance but could easily happen to a normal VMware environment.

With Riverbed Steelfusion, we present out a LUN to a remote location as iSCSI… this remote location creates the datastore etc. as with a normal environment and therefore place a lock on the LUN.  In our situation today, the remote location had a failure of the Riverbed Steelfusion appliance (something that doesn’t happen often) and we had to go through and present the LUN and virtual machines out of our data centre to allow the location to continue working whilst waiting for a replacement unit.

When trying to mount the LUN into our data centre environment we received an alert to say that the volume was locked… which makes sense because it wouldn’t have been released properly from the remote location.

A similar issue could occur in a data centre where a host has placed a lock on a LUN and has a failure, meaning that the lock doesn’t get released.

So, what do we do about it… well, the first thing to do is to try and reboot each of the hosts that have the LUN presented to it, as this could release the lock.

If you are still experiencing issues where the LUN is locked, then you need to break the lock using the following information… (please note that you should make sure that no other hosts are connected to the LUN as this will break to connection for all hosts)

vmkfstools -B /vmfs/devices/disks/disklunid

The LUN ID should be something similar to:  naa.60060160b3c018009bd1e02f725fdd11:1     please note that this is with the :1 at the end.

Full details of the process can be found here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1009570