I have come across issues unmounting VMware datastores myself multiple times. In recent vSphere versions vCenter shows you a warning if some of the requirements are not fulfilled. It is not the case in the older vSphere versions, which makes it harder to identify the issue.
Interestingly, there are some pre-requisites which even vCenter does not prompt you about. I will discuss all of the requirements in this post.
General Requirements
In this category I combine all requirements which vCenter checks against, such as:
Requirement: No virtual machine resides on the datastore.
Action: You have to make sure that the host you are unmounting the datastore from has no virtual machines (running or stopped) registered on this datastore. If you are unmounting just one datastore from just one host, you can simply vMotion all VMs residing on the datastore from this host to the remaining hosts. If you are unmounting the datastore from all hosts, you’ll have to either Storage vMotion all VMs to the remaining datastores or shutdown the VMs and unregister them from vCenter.
Requirement: The datastore is not part of a Datastore Cluster.
Requirement: The datastore is not managed by storage DRS.
Action: Drag and drop the datastore from the Datastore Cluster in vCenter to move it out of the Datastore Cluster. Second requirement is redundant, because SDRS is enabled on a datastore which is configured withing a Datastore Cluster. By removing a datastore from a Datastore Cluster you atomatically disable storage DRS on it.
Requirement: Storage I/O control is disabled for this datastore.
Action: Go to the datastore properties and uncheck Storage I/O Control option. On a SIOC-enabled datastore vSphere creates a folder named after the block device ID and keeps a file called “slotsfile” in it. Its size will change to 0.00 KB once SIOC is disabled.
Requirement: The datastore is not used for vSphere HA heartbeat.
Action: vSphere HA automatically selects two VMware datastores, creates .vSphere-HA folders and use them to keep HA heartbeats. If you have more than two datastores in your cluster, you can control which datastores are selected. Go to cluster properties > Datastore Heartbeating (under vSphere HA section) and select preferred datastores from the list. This will work if you are unmounting one datastore. If you need to unmount all datastores, you will have to disable HA on the cluster level altogether.
Additional Requirements
Requirements which fall in this category are not checked by vCenter, but are still have to be satisfied. Otherwise vCenter will not let you unmount the datastore.
Requirement: The datastore is not used for swap.
Action: When VM is powered on by default it creates a swap file in the VM directory with .vswp extension. You can change the default behavior and on a per host basis select a dedicated datastore where host will be creating swap files for virtual machines. This setting is enabled in cluster properties in Swapfile Location section. The datastore is then selected for each host in Virtual Machine Swapfile Location settings on the the host configuration tab.
What host also does when you enable this option is it creates a host local swap file, which is named something like this: sysSwap-hls-55de2f14-6c5d-4d50-5cdf-000c296fc6a7.swp
There are scenarios where you need to unmount the swap datastore, such as when you say need to reconnect all of your storage from FC to iSCSI. Even if you shutdown all of your VMs, datastore unmount will fail because the host swap files are still there and you will see an error such as this:
The resource ‘Datastore Name: iSCSI1 VMFS uuid: 55de473c-7f3ae2b5-f9f8-000c29ba113a’ is in use.
See the error stack for details on the cause of the problem.
Error Stack:
Call “HostStorageSystem.UnmountVmfsVolume” for object “storageSystem-29” on vCenter Server “VC.lab.local” failed.
Cannot unmount volume ‘Datastore Name: iSCSI1 VMFS uuid: 55de473c-7f3ae2b5-f9f8-000c29ba113a’ because file system is busy. Correct the problem to retry the operation.
The workaround is to change the setting on the cluster level to store VM swap file in VM directory and reboot all hosts. After a reboot the host .swp file will disappear.
If rebooting the hosts is not desirable, you can SSH to each host and type the following command:
# esxcli sched swap system set –hostlocalswap-enabled false
To confirm that the change has taken effect run:
# esxcli sched swap system get
Then check the datastore and the .swp files should no longer be there.
Conclusion
If you satisfy all of the above requirements you should have no problems when unmounting VMware datastores. vSphere creates a few additional system folders on each of the datastores, such as .sdd.sf and .dvsData, but I personally have never had issues with them.
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