Question:  Environment
4 VMWare hosts running VMware ESX 4.0.0 build-164009 connected to NetApp SAN over Fibre Channel

Problem
After a reboot 1 host was no longer able to see Datastores – Refresh/Add Storage both yield no results

During trouble shooting found some other hosts are unable to browse all the Datastores(luns) presented to them – while others are working fine

A second host lost connection to all Datastores on NetApp device after doing a refresh on the Storage views – the VM’s running on this host are now down too.

Storage Adapters show HBA’s as well as devices and paths all correct and up. This was working a few hours ago and has been for over a month. No changes have occufred to any systems

Call has been logged with VMWare but our support wont kick in for 9 hours – NetApp support say the SAN is functioning correctly and no issues they can see

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Would be grateful for any ideas on what to check.

Thanks in advance

Solution:

Thank you for all the responses

Managed to resolve this with VMWare support

The VMWare machines had lost their partition tables

Disk /dev/sdb: 590.5 GB, 590578974720 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 71800 cylinders, total 1153474560 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

Ran
fdisk -u /dev/sdb

and recreated the partition tables from scratch

This then propegated through the other VMHosts and a refresh resolved the issue