I have a VM on a portable drive. To add the VM to inventory, I had to create a datastore that points to the portable drive. On bootup of the server, the portable drive is not connected but is plugged into the USB port as needed. VMWare Server 2 doesn't recognize that datastore unless the drive is plugged in at boot up time.
If, after plugging in the portable drive, I try to execute a remote console shortcut to that VM, I get this error:
"The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state (Powered Off)".
If I open the admin console page after plugging in the portable drive, the inventory for this VM says "Unknown (Inaccessible)".
If I remove the VM from inventory in the hopes of re-adding it. When I try to re-add the VM, the Datastore for the portable drive is listed but when I click to open the datastore the Contents column says:
"The Datastore Browser could not successfully retrieve data from the server."
I then tried simply double-clicking the VMX file for the VM. There was no file association in Windows so I didn't pursue this further yet.
My next thought was to remove and re-add the datastore, forcing VMWare Server to see the portable drive (I am able to browse the drive in Windows Explorer). I cannot find any way to remove a Datastore from the list. When I try to re-add the Datastore, I get an error that it is the same name. I could possibly add the Datastore using a different name but since there doesn't seem to be a way to delete them once created, I didn't want to try that yet.
So there are four problems/questions that I have:
1. Is there a way to refresh the inventory list within the web based admin page?
2. In VMWare Server 1.x, I could simply double-click a VMX file and it would add to inventory. This didn't work inVMWare Server 2. There was no file association in Windows. Is it possible to fix this?
3. Is there a way to refresh the Datastore contents?
4. Is there a way to delete a Datastore that is no longer wanted or used?
The only thing that worked was to reboot the server with the portable drive connected. This is not always a desirable procedure.
Thanks,
Dale
Message was edited by: dalepres