Tuesday, December 27, 2011

ESX datastore in use but nothing is there!

I was moving data off a datastore to reformat it as a VMFS 5 filesystem (ok, I'm probably a little paranoid about upgrading).  After moving everything off, I still could not delete it as I was getting a 'resource in use' error.  Browsing the datastore didn't show anything. I made sure that HA wasn't using it.  After poking around more, I used the 'maps' feature in vCenter to see what it thought was connected and 'lo there was a VM mapped to that datastore.  I proceeded to verify that there wasn't a reference via the CD or floppy device, all the disks were referenced, etc.

What took me too long to figure out was that the VM had a couple of snapshots and those snapshots had references to the datastore.  Delete the snapshots and the reference is gone and the datastore can be deleted normally.

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