I lost a previous installation of esxi 6.5 due to boot drive failure. This installation had 2 data stores: one on the boot drive ("VM_POOL") and another 7TB one on a RAID6 configuration ("DELL_RAID6"). This 7TB data store mainly contained one large virtual disk which was used as a secondary drive on a Windows VM. I lost that VM but I still have that VMDK.
I replaced the boot drive and installed esxi again, but this time with v6.7 U1 A03 (based on a Dell customized ISO). The new system booted up without issues and automatically found the 7TB data store. I created a new datastore "VM_POOL" for a new Windows VM. Then I tried to add the VMDK to this new VM as a secondary drive but this is where the problem is. I am getting an error when I try to do so:
- Failed to add disk 'scsi0:1'.
- Failed to power on 'scsi0:1'.
- Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/59349365-08186f18-21e2-1866da64be1d/Server/Server_1.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
- Failed to lock the file
There are actually 2 VMDK files in the data store
server_1.vmdk
server_1-000002.vmdk
I should note, in case it matters, that the new VM_POOL is based on VMFS6 whereas the old Dell_RAID6 is on VMFS5. I hope somebody has encountered the same problem and knows how to resolve it. Thanks for your feedback in advance.