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Thursday, December 9, 2010

Unable to add virtual machine to inventory with error: “Invalid datastore path ‘sanfs://vmfs_uuid:”

I ran into an interesting problem a few weeks ago when I was moving a demo VMware View 4.5 environment to a new Cisco UCS cluster. The new cluster I was moving it to was managed by a vCenter server that managed a lot of other hosts with virtual machines scattered everywhere because this was our test, dev, and everything else environment. Needless to say, it was hard to find what you’re looking for so please excuse my mistake in generating the following error message when I completed the copying process then trying to inventory the virtual machine:

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Invalid datastore path 'sanfs://vmfs_uuid:4cbd5511-e5a34e80-e092-001018659ff2/ULDEMOVIEW01/ULDEMOVIEW01.vmx'.

Solution

So what happened? Well, I actually chose the wrong ESXi server when specifying the host to add this virtual machine to:

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The host this virtual machine was copied to was actually ESXi02 but I had selected ESXi01.

To try and add a bit more value to this post since the situation I encountered here probably is one of the many reasons this error might be thrown, I did talk to a VMware engineer about other scenarios that may cause this and I was told that it’s usually a permissions issue. No surprise there. :)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks! Did the same exact thing today. Greg.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely spot on solution, thanks!

Unknown said...

thanks brother, i also faced the same issue, cz of my mistake.Saif Oman

Anonymous said...

Thank you! Funny how the VMware KB doesn't explain this.

Unknown said...

My first thought on seeing this solution was, "How could anyone be so dumb." But sure enough, this is exactly what was happening to me. The hosts had become re-ordered from what I was used to, due to removing and re-adding a host, and as they were named by IP address, I wasn't paying all that much attention to where I was clicking. Doh! Thanks!

Unknown said...

is this true ????!!!!
i didn't believe until i try it by my self and checking all hosts til i found the right one.
thanks for your KB :)
:( vmware

Malte said...

Thanks! Helped a lot. "Big" problem, easy solution.
The problem was in front of the monitor :-)