My ESXi system has crashed due to this error:

"Lost access to volume 496befed-1c79c817-6beb-001ec9b60619 (VM1) due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will be reported shortly."

I can reboot the system and everything works fine, but a few minutes later this error pops up in the event viewer and everything hangs. I can log back into vsphere client however it cannot detect any storage or controller.

I'm using a 3ware 9650-SE 4L. It's been running solid for about 3 months with no problems. After hours of searching I am still no closer to solving this issue. I noticed the RAID bios Verifying the raid unit during reboot but status turns out ok.

Any Ideas?

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Any patches or changes made lately? Have you looked through /var/log/messages?

Ok, so after many hours of trial and error I found the problem was comming from one of my new VM's. I recently did a P2v of a Win2003 domain controller and at first looked as if everything carried over fine. However I noticed the error stopped when I did not power on that machine. As soon as I powered on the new VM it causes this error and the whole system locks up.



The one change I made before this happened was increasing the HD space for that virtual machine. I am not very adept at looking through logs so I'm not sure what to look for. I was not able to find the error in the logs, maybe because when I restart vsphere the logs are cleared?

Thanks for your input. This site has been instrumental in my first server build. Here are the specs if anyone is interested.

Evga x58
Intel i7 950 3.0 GHZ
12 GB RAM
4 1 TB WD Caviar Black SATA HD's
3ware 9650 SE-4LPML w/ RAID 5 2.7 TB unit
4GB USB flash for Hypervisor
3 NICs; 1 Realtek 8168 2 Intel pro 1000 GT

Which driver did you use for the 9650?

If you've installed to HD you can also look at the Advanced Configuration parameter (go to Configuration > Software > Advanced Settings)Syslog-> local. datastore. Those logs are a copy of /var/log/messages and persist across a reboot (not the case if you're using USB but you can point that location to a datastore).