A downside to VVols

I picked up a Dell Equallogic PS6000 for my homelab.  Updated it to the latest firmware and discovered it’s capable of VVols.  Yay!  I created a container and (eventually) migrated nearly everything to it.  Seriously, every VM except  Avamar VE.  Started creating and destroying VMs; DRS is happily moving VMs among the hosts.

UNTIL (dun dun dun)

The Equallogic VSM, running the VASA storage provider gets stuck during a vMotion.  Hmm, I notice that all of the powered-off VMs now have a status of “inaccessible”.  On the hosts, the VVol “datastore” is inaccessible.  

Ok, that’s bad.  Thank goodness for Cormac Hogan’s post about this issue.  It boils down to a chicken-and-egg problem.  vCenter relies on the VASA provider to supply information about the VVol.  If the VASA provider resides on the VVols, there’s no apparent way to recover it.  There’s no datastore to find the vmx and re-register, the connections to the VVols are based on the VM, so if it’s not running, there’s no connection to it.

To resolve, I had to create a new instance of the Equallogic VSM, re-register it with vCenter, re-register it as a VASA provider and add the Equallogic group.  Thankfully, the array itself is the source-of-truth for the VVol configuration, so the New VSM picked it up seamlessly.

So your options are apparently to place the VSM/VASA provider on a non-VVol or build a new one every time it shuts down.  Not cool.