vSphere: Cannot Change the Host Configuration

KB ID 0001565

Problem

There’s always one! I had a single ESX host that refused to add a datastore?

Failed to create VFMS Datastore {Name} – Cannot change the host configuration.

Solution

I already half suspected what the problem was, because I’d had a similar problem earlier on this week presenting disks to a Windows VM, there’s a GPT partition table on the dive/array.

But without waiting an hour for the HP RAID software to security erase the drives, (and a reboot,) how would I do the same with ESX?

First take note of the drive device name.

Enable SSH on your ESX host.

Connect with an SSH client, and list the device names with the following commands;

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cd /dev/disks
ls

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Copy the device name to the clipboard, and execute the following command;

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partedUtil mklabel /dev/disks/{device-id} msdos

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Then try to add the datastore again.

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

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11 thoughts on “vSphere: Cannot Change the Host Configuration

  1. Same Error can occur when Jumbo Frames are not enable on ISCSI related physical switches. Had a client reuse some Nimble storage on new cluster and attached the ISCSI connections to a new switch. MTU was set to 9000 on the array and on the vSwitch but not on the physical switch. Adjusting MTU size on the array and vSwitch corrected the issue.

  2. I read 5 other articles before coming here. I knew it was a partition issue as these SSD’s were originally raid 0 under Ubuntu. The methods people were using were insane. One was take the drives out, each one, and format them under windows. One shell command to rule them all. Love it.

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