Force Mounting Snapshot LUNS on VMWARE ESXi Hosts
We all know that the recommended way to implement the Virtual Server Environment is to have a Clustered ESXi hosts together with Clustered Datastores which is presented to all the hosts in the same ESXi cluster. We ideally add the storage to one of the Host on the Cluster which then is automatically presented\reflected under all the hosts in the cluster but there are cases where some hosts do not see the Storage disk\share automatically.
In the above case, an Administrator usually tries to scan the Storage and HBAs or try to add the Storage LUN from Add Storage Console and select the Disk by identifying the NAA or WWN ID which is shared by Storage Team to see if it helps to add the presented disk to the Host and it helps in most cases.
As mentioned, the above steps do help the Administrators in adding the disks in most cases but there are times when we don't see the disk on the Host. This is because the Host consider the LUN as a Snapshot Disk instead and won't add it automatically. In order to add the LUN manually, we need to follow the below steps:
1. Connect to the Host using SSH Putty Session
2. Run the command to list visible Volumes : esxcfg-volume -l
3. Once the Volumes are listed above: Make a note of the Volume UUID as we would need it to manually mount it.
4. Run the following command to mount the volume: esxcfg-volume -m <UUID>
Here the UUID is replaced with UUID which we received in point#2
Note: Please see below screenshot (highlighted part shows the Storage Disk UUID and Label which are separated by "/" character. While adding the disk, use only the UUID as shown in the last line of the screenshot)
By running the above command we would be able to add the LUN to the Host successfully and we would see the change in vCenter Client within few minutes
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