21 thoughts on “VMs Grayed Out (Inaccessible) After NFS Datastore Restored”

1. I ran into this last year (2012) running FreeNAS, my solution was to mount the NFS store on my local Linux box, for whatever reason (Didn’t test further) that brought it all back to live and I was able to power up the VM’s again without any other steps.

2. Thanks. Really a time saver.

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4. Thanks Matt – found this really useful. Its much better than the manual process of unregistering and re-registering each VM individually (all while searching through datastores to find the VM file). Much appreciated!

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6. I had a similar situation using Nexentastor (community edition) but with FC targets. Anyway – it was my View Horizon VMs on NFS that were ‘inaccessible.’ After fiddling for a few hours, I had a corrupt dvswitch on one host – so fixed that manually. After that, placed each host into maintenance mode so all the machines were migrated or unregistered from the host to another, and after doing that to my hosts, all my grey out machines re-registered on the hosts. Magical! Still, losing storage is not a good thing. Time to put a bigger UPS on data.

7. I have this issue but the script isn’t working for me.
   It reloads all VM’s including running ones.

   It seems that if I do the following:
   $VMs = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | ?{$_.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq “invalid” -or $_.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq “inaccessible”} | select name,@{Name=”GuestConnectionState”;E={$_.Runtime.ConnectionState}}

   Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | ?{$VMs}

   Then I get a list of all VM’s, not just the filtered VM’s.

   • I had the same issue, did the following to make it work for me:

     Changed:
     Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | ?{$VMs} | %{$_.reload()}

     to:
     Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | Where {$_.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq “inaccessible”} | %{$_.reload()}

     Otherwise this little scrip was a brilliant find for me since we’ve had some “minor” issues with NFS and I kept having to either bounce services.sh on the host or enter/exit maintenance mode.

     • There you go! :) Thanks for this fix! :)

8. This also seems to be the case for my iSCSI datastores. I do have one NFS datastore, but if the machines are shutdown, and there is a network outage or issue, I see the same issue for VM’s that were shutdown/off. You can also use the ‘vim-cmd vmsvc/reload ‘ to get them back without having to reboot, or mess with the inventory.

   • Also, you can easily get the id’s with ‘vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms’ and it will show the ones with issues as “invalid vm -id-“

   • Thanks for that – a good one to know.

9. Many thanks, the PowerCLI script has saved me a lot of time!

   Suffered two recent outages where my UPS failed to keep all my infrastructure up (for long enough), and again today when I pulled the cable out of the wrong device and took my ReadyNAS 2100 offline :-(

   One minor tweak that would have benefited me would be to take the following as input for your script:
   Get-VMHost | Where {$_.ConnectionState -eq “Connected”} | Get-VM
   because one of my hosts is currently deliberately powered off and it tried to reload that hosts’s VMs. Not too experienced with using Get-View and didn’t have time or I’d have coded it up myself.

10. If NFS datastore really came back on and no problem for esx host to see it, then this is just a matter of vCenter losing its connection to VM.

    Simply restarting management agents on esx host can resolve this issue. Here are two methods to do that

    1. if you can login to esx via ssh. Then run the following commands.

    /etc/init.d/hostd restart
    /etc/init.d/vpxa restart

    2. Via ESX console
    Troubleshooting Mode Options > Restart Management Agents.

    This has no impact on the other active VMs running on the host.

    • Thanks Lance Yoon, restart management agents via console saved my life :D

11. The only problem that I see with this method is that all of the inaccessible VMs do not retain their Blue Folder locations. It’s nice to massively recover the VMs from the state that they got in. Which is still better than having the VM users to remove and then readd the VM manually.

12. Thanks. For me remove from inventory and relocate resolve my problem!

13. Thank you for this. I recently had to do this for a single cluster in a large vCenter environment and made use of the commands you outlined to write this more targeted script:

    Disconnect-VIServer * -Confirm:$false
    Connect-VIServer vCenterFQDN
    $vms = Get-Cluster “Cluster Name” | Get-VM
    foreach ($vm in $vms) {
    $vmview = $vm | Get-View
    if ($vmview.runtime.connectionstate -eq “inaccessible”) {
    $vm.name
    $vmview.reload()
    }
    }

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15. vim-cmd vmsvc/reload

16. The problem still haunts some setups, apparently.

    Your script saved me a lot of time!
    Thanks a lot!

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