ESXi – unable to complete sysinfo operation when unmounting NFS datastore

I am currently trying to prepare a old NetApp filer (FAS960C) for a cold hard life in the scrap yard.

I thought it would be as simple as storage vmotioning all the VMs off it, and then simply unmounting the datastore from vSphere. Unfortunately I get this message when trying to unmount the darn thing.

what the heck does this mean?

what the heck does this mean?

So the error message says see the VMKernel log. I enable ssh on the host and check out /var/log/messages. [na] is the name of my datastore.

GFeb 12 06:34:33 vmkernel: 0:00:57:57.020 cpu11:5646)WARNING: NFS: 1675: na has open files, cannot be unmounted

So which files does it have open?!? I have removed all the VMs. This was the tricky part – on a normal Linux box, you would run lsof and in two seconds you would know which process using the files. In ESXi, you go:


esxcli network connection list | grep datastore ip/hostname

This returns the following :


/vmfs/volumes/c87b8682-017488df # esxcli network connection list | grep 10.0.0.10
tcp 0 0 10.0.0.45:1014 10.0.0.10:2049 ESTABLISHED 5163
tcp 0 0 10.0.0.45:1013 10.0.0.10:2049 ESTABLISHED 5163

The first IP column is the host, the second is the datastore. The last column is the world ID , which is like a PID. So plugging this into ps gives me:

/vmfs/volumes/c87b8682-017488df # ps aux | grep 5163
5163 5163 busybox syslogd

Well there you go – it looks like we have set this up this machine to use the Netapp as a place to store logs. Completely forgot I ever did that! A quick check of the software -> advanced settings dialog reveals this is the case:

vsphere syslog settings

Clearing that dialog and a quick reboot will fix that.

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