Can you check the Host Access tab of the datastore and ensure your host has been provided with read/write, allow root access?

The hosts have all been added for access and on the appropriate networks.  Unless I am missing something with VVOL's, I don't have an option to specifically allow root access like you would with NFS.

what is the capacity you are seeing for this VVOL ? If it is zero, the time is not connect on VSA and need to be fixed (along with ESX).

Also is this vvol via NFS or Block? If NFS works, there is no reason vvol will not work other than time issue.

For NFS you can also just do a showmount –e from any Unix/Linux host

Hi Andrew,

A few assumptions here:

- This is the VSA community edition. If not, you are asking the wrong people / wrong place.

  If this is a VSA Professional Edition, you should open an SR for this.

- From your notes here, seems like we are talking file vVOLs, not block.

So I have just created a few file vVOLs here on different systems (and I have created a dummy folder on them from the VMware side to test access), just to see what steps you may have missed.

A few things to look at (I don’t know exactly what you are using to test write access, but here goes):

- Like Wen stated:

  The hosts were provided access when the vVOL Datastore was created on the Unity side?

  In Unity Unisphere, check Storage > VMware > datastores > datastore properties > host access tab

  Your hosts should be listed here with the file protocol on the right column

- In the vSphere Web Client, the VASA provider was added correctly and shows online and active (you accepted the certificate pop up, etc).

  https://cUVSA_IP:8443/vasa/version.xml (no restrictions on this port)

- In vSphere, in the datastores section, does the datastore show up normal or with a red "inaccessible" or "inactive" symbol?

  What about in your specific host > related objects > datastores?

- If you go into the datastore directly (datastores > Manage > files) can you create a dummy folder or you also get the write error here?

- If all config is ok (including Mani’s point above), remove the storage provider and add again without touching anything else (leave the datastore mounted on the hosts). Refresh / rescan. See how it goes.

I started over from scratch today to make sure all the ideas so far have been tried, so this is basically a fresh install. I unregistered the old VSA from Vcenter, made sure any datastore was removed, and then removed all the hosts from the VSA, deleted it, and redeployed. Here is what I have after doing that.

-This is for Community Edition.

-All VVOL’s, no block.

-All 6 hosts have access to the VMware Datastore for File. It shows File and FC in the right column, but only using File, I’m guessing that is a carryover from the physical device OS. I also made sure to ignore the networks I am not using for storage communication (Vmotion VLAN in my case) on each host.

-VASA provider shows online and active, there are no port restrictions, cert was accepted.

-Vcenter shows the volume after I add it, but it shows zero bytes for capacity, free space, provisioned space. It does not show inaccessible however. There is an alarm on the datastore from Vsphere HA trying to write its files to it, which it can’t since it’s not writable.

-NTP server is setup identical on all hosts and VSA, time is same on everything.

Going to the datastore and trying to create a folder, or upload a file, fails with the original errors in my post.

Andy

Andy,

Can you check and compare the local time on both ESX and VSA?

In VSA you can enable ssh and login as service, "date" command will show the local time.

See here for a good blog showing step-by-step a successful install and config http://blog.mdschneider.me/unityvsa-part-1-html5-ftw/

The time is within 1s of each other, they are pointed to the same time server.

so the other known cause could be either PE (Protocol Endpoint) or VASA 2.0 registration. try to delete all and recreate again. If still fails, unity vsa logs and esx logs need to be reviewed.