Problem:
We have a server in which some Virtual Machines (VM) are running on VMware ESXi 5.5. In these Virtual Machines, we have RHEL 5.8, RHEL 6.8, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 R2. One day suddenly server (DL560 Gen8) reached a hanged state due to some issue related to the motherboard and all the VMs stopped working.
That time we have no solution for this error so we rebooted the server using the power button (hard boot) which resolve the problem and the machine started. After that we tried to start the VMs, all VMs started except one VM which was Windows Server 2008 R2 and when we tried to start that VM it was showing the below errors:
“Failed to start the virtual machine.
Cannot open the disk ‘/vmfs/volumes/52b66ab4-8c801b45-fd7a-a0d3c10119c0/BACKUPSERVER/BACKUPSERVER_6.vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
19 (No such device)”.
Failed to start the virtual machine
Reason:
Some LUNs/disks from SAN were mapped with this VM through RAW Device Mapping for backups of data. Due to the motherboard issue when we had hard booted the server HBA cards stopped working. LUNs were mapped to the VM but due to the unavailability of the HBA cards, VM was not able to access these LUNs/Disks so VM was giving the disk error for these LUNs while we were trying to start the VM.
Failed to start the virtual machine_HBA Cards are not showing
Solution:
Log a case to the HP support and they will resolve the issue by replacing the parts which will make the HBA cards available after that LUNs will be accessible to VM and it will start successfully.
If you want to start the VM without those disks then please follow the solution given below:
To remove the above error we need to remove the disks (which were mapped from the SAN) from the VM and after the removal of these disks, VM will start successfully.
- Right-click on the Virtual Machine (VM) and click on the Edit Settings.
- Identify the disk from the error log, in my case there are many and I have taken BACKUPSERVER_9.vmdk and BACKUPSERVER_10.vmdk in this example which are Hard disk 2 and Hard disk 3.
- Select the Hard Disk 2 and Hard disk 3 and click on the Remove button to remove this LUN from this Virtual Machine.
- Click on the OK button.
- Now start the Virtual Machine and it will start without any error or warning.
