Datastore conflicts with an existing datastore in the datacenter that has the same URL” error in vCenter Server

December 9, 2021 at 2:53 pm Leave a comment

Hi Guys.

Let me share my recent experience with a VMware Upgrade on a Nutanix Cluster. We planned the upgrade from vSphere 6.7 U3 to vSphere 7.0 U1.

As usual we started the Nutanix LCM upgrade and brought the cluster to the latest Firmware & BIOS drivers.

Thereafter , I started upgrading the ESXi , I used the offline .zip file for the upgrade. I followed the below steps.

Uploaded the offline bundle VMware-ESXI-7.0U1-16850804-depot.zip to the datastore.
Ran the below command to findout the profile name
esxcli software sources profile list -d /xxxxxxx/xxxxxx/VMware-ESXI-7.0U1-16850804-depot.zip
Get the profile name from the output of the above command which is ESXi-7.0.1-1685 and used it in command as below
esxcli software profile update -d /xxxxxxx/xxxxxx/VMware-ESXI-7.0U1-16850804-depot.zip -p ESXi-7.0.1-1685

Everything went well and rebooted the server but,

CVM is shown inaccessible.
Local datastore was missing from the server.

As adviced by the Nutanix support , restarted the server for the second time. and I was able to see the local datastore. Still we could not exit from the maintenance mode. As it was giving the error “Datastore conflicts with an existing datastore in the datacenter that has the same URL” error in vCenter Server”.

The issue was resolved after following the VMware KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/79623.

To worsen up our situation , for some reason the ESXi version got reverted automatically to the previous build ESXi 6.7 after following the steps in the KB. So we decided to check the boot.cfg files in bootbank & altbootbank locations.

#tail -2 /*bootbank/boot.cfg
It was showing only the ESXi 7.0 U1 only.

Again we contacted the VMware support and resolved the issue with the below steps.

Checked whether achi is disabled or not by typing the command on the ESXi shell.
#grep ahci /etc/vmware/esx.conf
/vmkernel/module/vmw_ahci/enabled = “false”

The output shows the achi is disabled and Enabled it by typing
#esxcfg-module -e vmw_ahci

Thereafter ran the upgrade again using the same steps and rebooted the server.Voila we were able to see the correct version. For some reason the default ahci driver provided from VMware has been disabled.

Sources:
https://anthonyspiteri.net/datastore-esxi7-upgrade-supermicro/

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/79623