Datastores missing after reboot

ESXi 5.5
2x LSI 8380ELP
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 v3.0 bios

I was humming along fine on 5.1, I then updated to 5.5 and everything was stll fine. Two weeks later I now have 3 specific datastores/drives that disappear from ESXi. They are all on the same LSI controller and port. There are two more drive on that controller but they have no issue. The drives don't disappear from the LSI array, only from ESXi. They are all essentially setup as single drive Raid 0. (pretty much a jbod). I'm not sure if this is an LSI problem because they show up in the LSI bios just fine. Only ESXi has the issue seeing them after reboot. You can add them back to the datastore listing without issue with data still intact. However soon as you reboot the server they are gone again.

Anybody have any ideas on what could cause this?

This sounds like data corruption. You suffer any unexpected power loss recently? Also try name the disappearing datastores something else, and reboot. This has happened to me before, and it was because of power outage/corruption (I was running with unprotected write back cache).

My first guess is try using the command line to persistently mount the volumes, ESXi might be thinking these volumes are snapshot volumes and that could be preventing the persistent mount.

See
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1011387

You could try a resig however be aware if using VMware View or vCloud this would cause issues due to the signature being different!

Phog i wouldn't see it as corruption if he can mount the volume back and no data is corrupted as per the bottom line. plus i would assume there to be metadata corruption if wouldnt allow it to mount initially...

Thankyou very much for the replies. I'll give your suggestions a try tonight.

Ok I figured it out. While testing the suggestions I noticed that during the Add Disk/LUN prompt it gives the option of "Keep the exsisting signature" or "Assign new signature" I tried using assign new signature and that seemed to fix my issue.

Yea sometimes a resignature is needed if it think its a snapshot lun for any reason which in reality it shouldn't have you tried the reboots to ensure that it stays persistent?

Yeah to test i did one hard drive then rebooted and it stayed.
I then added the other two drives and rebooted and they stayed as well.
No idea why this would happen in the first place. But it was odd that all 3 are on the same LSI card and port. There are two more drives on that card but they are on the other port. Lol this leaves me scared because I have 0 backups at the present time, however UPS is on its way with my backup drives.

w0rd i hear ya, but in reality luns not mounting isnt that big of a concern especially if you got them mounted... there was a lot of storage changes in 5.5 so i would chalk it up to major code change... but i would back it all up just because!