NFS: Unable to create datastore: The specified key, name, or identifier already exists.

Summary:
I have a shared NFS datastore mapped to all my hosts.  So I found it strange that two hosts in a cluster of 5 were not seeing it.  When I would try to map it, I would get the following error:
Unable to create datastore: The specified key, name, or identifier already exists.

This worked for me:
It seems I had an old mapping in place that wasn't showing up in vCenter until I refreshed the storage view to show the 'inactive' mount:
Once the inactive mount appeared, I was able to unmount it, then remount the correct path.
[If the refresh doesn't work, you may need to SSH to the host and run the ESXCLI commands listed toward the bottom of the post]

I found it interesting in that running "vicfg-nas <a bunch of connection options here> --vihost myesxserver -l" did not list this inactive path either.  It might have shown up if I connected directly to the ESXi host w/ the vSphere client, but I did not check.

ESXi 5, you'll need to use the esxcli commands like so:
esxcli storage nfs list

esxcli storage nfs remove -v nameOfDatastoreVolume

Comments

Anonymous said…
Interesting. Let me know if you believe this is a bug and I'll ask the appropriate resource(s) to check into it.

And congrats on vExpert recognition again for 2013.

~Steve Sieczko
Unknown said…
As an additional note, I could not see this "ghost" unmounted datastore from the vSphere web client, but I could see it from the desktop infrastructure client.
Unknown said…
As an additional note, I could not see this "ghost" NFS datastore from the vSphere web client, but I could see it from the desktop infrastructure client as shown in this post.

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