This is a pretty standard one. You deploy a small environment that only has a single shared Datastore (like a Nutanix cluster maybe). Enable HA and all of a sudden all of the hosts are complaining that there is only one Datastore for heartbeating and the required minimum is 2.

Hi, How can I set datastore heartbeat if VSAN if the only datastore in my cluster?

That’s an easy one to resolve. There’s an advanced setting that allows you to safely ignore this warning and turn your console back to the error free goodness that it once was.

Datastores in VMware vSphere are storage containers for files. They could be located on a local server hard drive or across the network on a SAN. Datastores hide the specifics of each storage device and provide a uniform model for storing virtual machine files. Datastores are used to hold virtual machine files, templates, and ISO images.
VMware’s logic is that vCenter is used to manage so many Tier 1 applications and that makes vCenter, itself, a Tier 1 application. We all know that Tier 1 applications need to be highly available. So, if VMware’s logic is right, then vCenter also needs to be highly available. That is where vCenter Heartbeat steps in.
This is a pretty standard one. You deploy a small environment that only has a single shared Datastore (like a Nutanix cluster maybe). Enable HA and all of a sudden all of the hosts are complaining that there is only one Datastore for heartbeating and the required minimum is 2.

Fire up Google and find this KB article. (https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004739) because I can never remember the exact parameter. Awesome. Fire up the VI Client and go to advanced options.

Ummm??? Where the hell is advanced options?? It was always been here.

Not anymore. To access advanced options, be sure to fire up the WEB CLIENT. I’m not sure when they made the change but with the 6.0 vSphere Fat Client, advanced options are no longer there.

Once you are in the RIGHT client though, the fix is again pretty easy.

If you are still using the Windows Client as a crutch, start using the web client. eventually, you won’t have a choice.

Another lovely Friday starting off with strange issues, when taking a host out of standard maintenance we noticed that HA would not reconfigure, and kept saying The object ‘vim.Datastore:datastore-1131’ has already been deleted or has not been completely created. This was strange because no other hosts had this issue.

I proceeded to follow standard troubleshooting steps, reconfigure HA…same issue….disable HA for entire cluster and re-enable…..same issue…whoops thats not good!

First step, check what luns are available to the cluster.

Seems that 1131 is missing..

Sometimes the more tools you have available to you, the easier it is to troubleshoot an issue. As part of my daily processes we have an automated script to execute and emails us an RVTools report so I can easily keep track of inventory objects in my vCenter, I went back a few days and was able to identify the lun, datastore and NAAID of this object.

Using vRealize Log Insight (Free for up to 25 OSI’s, in my case i only have my vCenter for logs) I was able to search for the NAAID and see exactly when and what happened to this lun….it was removed.

With this newfound information I went and spoke to our storage team, this lun was removed because it was no longer being used by Cluster1. Turns out This lun was zoned to two different clusters, but only used for VMs in Cluster1. Cluster2 in turn was using it for HA heartbeat. In my case to get HA to use a different lun, i chose option 3. Just in case lun’s ever get removed again. However after reconfiguring HA it still was trying to use the lun that was removed.

Resolution:

Increase Datastore Vmware

Use Option 2 - Once I selected two specific datastores, I was able to reconfigure HA and no longer had any errors. At this point you can reconfigure HA Datastore Heartbeat to your standard settings and reconfigure the cluster once again.

How to Prevent This?

Always remove luns the right way, its a lot more work, but can prevent issues like this in the future.

Unmount Datastore from all hosts
Detach lun from all hosts (if LUN is used for HA, it wont let you)
Unmap from storage array.

You can also use the following script to detach lun’s if you have a bunch of lun’s and/or hosts. You will need to unmount the datastores first before running.

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