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?

ailed to Create Datastore Cannot Change Host configuration

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.

Find Disk vmware reference

Enable SSH on your ESX host.

esx 6 7 enable SSH

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

cd /dev/disks
ls

ESX List Disks

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

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

ESX PartEd Disks

Then try to add the datastore again.

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

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Author: PeteLong

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11 Comments

  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.

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    • Steve, your solution was what resolved my issue. thanks!

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    • Thanks this worked for me as well

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    • Thank you Steve, same issue, no Jumbo Frames enabled on the physical switches, saved my day!

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  2. Hi, the solution posted above worked for my, life saver, thanks

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  3. Hi, Thank you. It solved my issue too.

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  4. Very useful. Just have to make sure twice you do it on the right disk 🙂 Thank you.

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  5. Thanks for the How-To. Worked great and easy. 🙂

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  6. 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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