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Restart management services on the second (additional) host. Seems like the host's hanging on to the datastore identifier somehow, was the datastore previously mounted to the host?

Essendon wrote: »

Restart management services on the second (additional) host. Seems like the host's hanging on to the datastore identifier somehow, was the datastore previously mounted to the host?

No, the datastore has never been mounted to the host before.

Hmmm, restart the management services on both hosts anyways and try again.

Essendon wrote: »

Hmmm, restart the management services on both hosts anyways and try again.

Working on this now; I set the second host to maintenance mode and HA is currently moving my VM's to host 1.

Now, restarting the management services, is that the same as restarting the hosts? I have restarted the hosts in the past.

No it's not the same as restarting the hosts. Restarting the management agents only keeps the VM's running so there's no disruption to services.

Did you grant the second host permissions to be able to mount the datastore? If not, you cant mount it.

Essendon wrote: »

Hmmm, restart the management services on both hosts anyways and try again.

Ok, I have restarted the management networks on both hosts, and getting same error message.

Any other thoughts?

Essendon wrote: »

No it's not the same as restarting the hosts. Restarting the management agents only keeps the VM's running so there's no disruption to services.

Did you grant the second host permissions to be able to mount the datastore? If not, you cant mount it.

I'm sorry; where do I do that at? Looking at the FreeNAS console, I see "Authorized IP addresses or hosts" which is blank, but everything else is able to access the NAS box.

Sorry I dont know where to do it in FreeNAS, I have never used the product. But that's what you need to do, grant the second host the rights to mount the database. Please Google around.

When mounting the NFS datastore on the second host, make sure you use the exact same details, including trailing slashes

So if you have mounted your datastore on the first host with

/mount/share/nfs

make sure you use the same path, rather than

/mount/share/nfs/

To avoid any typos, use SSH to create them on both hosts

esxcfg-nas -a <datastore name>  -o <nfs server hostname/ip> -s <mount point>

Hello,

Thank you for that great tip.

Unfortunately, the way I am trying to do this is from the VSphere web client home screen, I click storage, I then click my datastore to select it.

Next, I right click that datastore, go to all vcenter actions then mount datastore to additional host. I then see my single host which is in the same cluster, and I click the check box next to it.

Then I click ok, and get the error "The specified key, name, or identifier already exists"

I appreciate your help and I am a noob at this, so if there is anything no matter how mundane you think I may be missing I am all ears.

Thank you very much.

jibbajabba wrote: »
When mounting the NFS datastore on the second host, make sure you use the exact same details, including trailing slashes

So if you have mounted your datastore on the first host with

/mount/share/nfs

make sure you use the same path, rather than

/mount/share/nfs/

To avoid any typos, use SSH to create them on both hosts
esxcfg-nas -a <datastore name>  -o <nfs server hostname/ip> -s <mount point>

Have a look at my post here (Configuring FreeNAS 8.3 – iSCSI and NFS Storage for VMware vSphere « Everything Virtual), sure it's an older version of FreeNAS but it's still the same principle.

Thank you for the link Simon,

I am reading through it and you say to configure FreeNas for ISCSI; I am connecting to my NAS Via ethernet through a switch; will that matter?

SimonD. wrote: »

Have a look at my post here (Configuring FreeNAS 8.3 – iSCSI and NFS Storage for VMware vSphere « Everything Virtual), sure it's an older version of FreeNAS but it's still the same principle.

As you go further down the post I explain how to configure NFS as well.

I gotcha; I see the NFS part;

I have the NFS setup exactly as you described, and my ESXI1 host can see the storage/connect to it; but for some reason when I try to connect my ESXI2 host, Vsphere is giving me that error message.

SimonD. wrote: »

As you go further down the post I explain how to configure NFS as well.

When you configured your NFS datastore did configure the subnet or specific hosts as authorised hosts\networks?

Yes, i typed authorized host and network as 192.168.2.0/24

doodguy wrote: »

Yes, i typed authorized host and network as 192.168.2.0/24

Are you actually using 192.168.2.0/24?

Yes. And all hosts are pingable, can ping each other etc

Might be a long shot - have you tried to give the NFS a different name in vSphere ?

You can also try to restore a connection if the LUN maybe is mounted already, but does not appear

esxcfg-nas -r

then check if the datastore is listed

esxcfg-nas -l

Again, that requires SSH

If you have any facilities for remote connections then I am more than happy to have a look myself .. Quite difficult to diagnose this without seeing the actual infrastructure.

What do you mean? Do you mean did I rename the NFS Share?

My FreeNas has never been mounted to this host (ESXI2); I have a rackmount monitor/KVM setup; could I run those commands direct at the host?

jibbajabba wrote: »

Might be a long shot - have you tried to give the NFS a different name in vSphere ?

You can also try to restore a connection if the LUN maybe is mounted already, but does not appear

esxcfg-nas -r

then check if the datastore is listed

esxcfg-nas -l

Again, that requires SSH

If you have any facilities for remote connections then I am more than happy to have a look myself .. Quite difficult to diagnose this without seeing the actual infrastructure.

GSXRules

Did you install both hosts from scratch? Or did you copy the install somehow?

Yes; both were installed from scratch. I'm reading the Scott Lowe VMware book and going step by step through it building up this system as I go.

GSXRules wrote: »

Did you install both hosts from scratch? Or did you copy the install somehow?

doodguy wrote: »

What do you mean? Do you mean did I rename the NFS Share?

No, what I mean, when you mount an NFS datastore, you use IP of server, path and a name, whatever you want to call it.

Example. Here I connect to an NFS server 192.168.1.1.

The path of the folder (in your case the FreeNas share) is here NFS_MOUNT - note there is no trailing / at the end.

And the name TECHEXAMS (Can be anything)

You can even see the message about the exact same path I was referring to

If a datastore already exists in the datacenter for this NFS share and you intend to configure the same datastore on new hosts, make sure that you enter the same input data (Server and Folder) that you used for the original datastore.
Different input data would mean different datastores even if the underlying NFS storage is the same

Here you can see the NFS datastore is now mounted as TECHEXAMS

With trying to mount it as different name I mean other than TECHEXAMS, or whatever you called it.

So INSTEAD of using this screen:

Go to the second host and mount the NFS datastore the same way you did it on the first one. But like I say - if you do - make sure you use the exact same parameter.

IF it still fails on the second host with the same error, try again the same procedure, manually mounting, but use a different name than TECHEXAMS.

I hope that makes sense ..

Annoyingly, while I did that for the screenshots in my lab, it worked, so I can't even re-produce it.

I could offer you though taking a look. I could arrange some sort of remote session if that helps.

Thank you all VERY much for your help!

So I went ahead and created a new binding with a new name to my first host, and without any issues was able to then bind it to the second host. From there, I told each VM to move storage to the new datastore and issues resolved.

Doesn't make any sense to me why this issue happened in the first place but so glad I got through it.

Thank you all for your help and suggestions