An unplanned permanent device loss (PDL) condition occurs when a storage device becomes permanently unavailable without being properly detached from the ESXi host.
The following items in the
vSphere Client indicate that the device is in the PDL state:
- The datastore deployed on the device is unavailable.
- Operational state of the device changes to Lost Communication.
- All paths are shown as Dead.
- A warning about the device being permanently inaccessible appears in the VMkernel log file.
To recover from the unplanned PDL condition and remove the unavailable device from the host, perform the following tasks.
| Task | Description |
|---|---|
| Power off and unregister all virtual machines that are running on the datastore affected by the PDL condition. | See vSphere Virtual Machine Administration. |
| Unmount the datastore. | See Unmount Datastores. |
| Rescan all ESXi hosts that had access to the device.
Note: If the rescan is not successful and the host continues to list the device, some pending I/O or active references to the device might still exist. Check for any items that might still have an active reference to the device or datastore. The items include virtual machines, templates, ISO images, raw device mappings, and so on.
|
See Perform Storage Rescan. |
