Looking for a way to make my ESXi setup more robust. I am using three ESXi 5.0 servers in free mode - no HA, no vCenter. I've configured a single iSCSI target with 5 VM's sharing 3TB of fault-tolerant disk space. The target is a Freenas 8.3.0 server, and it seems to be working well for my (mostly testing) environment.
The problem occurs if I reboot any of the ESXi hosts. All iSCSI VM's that are running on the other ESXi hosts show as Unknonw (invalid). I'm pretty sure this is because the .vmx files are locked by the other hosts running those VM's. Any iSCSI VM that is powered off shows up just fine on the rebooted ESXi host.
So far, the only ways I've found to get my VM's to show up again on the rebooted host are:
1. Power off all the iSCSI VM's, and reboot the problem host. When it comes back up, all those formerly unknown VM's show up again as valid hosts. Naturally this can be incovenient at best!
2. Power off a problem VM, and add it back as new inventory, then power it back up on whichever ESXi server I feel like using. This is slightly better than powering all the VM's off at once, but it's still inconvenient, and it leaves those Unknown entries in place. I can delete them all, but I'm hoping for some better solution or workaround.
As a minimum, I'd like a way to power off a problem VM, and somehow refresh the rebooted ESXi server in such a way that its corresponding Unknown entry comes back as a proper VM entry for the powered-down guest. I can reboot the ESXI host to achieve this, except it's also normally running some other guests.
Best of all, I'd like a rebooted ESXi host to come back up without seeing those VM's in use on other hosts as Unknown. Can this be done without HA or vCenter? Is there a configuration option I've neglected?