Some of my 6.7 ESXi hosts got into this situation frequently after I run some automated tests. I have a few VMs in a NFS datastore, I powered all of them off, delete them from disk, go the ESXi console, checked the VM folder are gone, but if I try to create new VM with same name in same datastore, it complains "File exists", same problem if I run mkdir directly.
[root@houh10-0745:~] cd /vmfs/volumes/ds1
[root@houh10-0745:/vmfs/volumes/e1974343-ed7fe9e2] ls
[root@houh10-0745:/vmfs/volumes/e1974343-ed7fe9e2] mkdir win2k8_dtw_01rg_200_ATF_1
mkdir: can't create directory 'win2k8_dtw_01rg_200_ATF_1': File exists
I have not figure out how to get the ESXi into this state, other than run the long automated test so far.
When the ESXi is in this state, I tried restart vCenter, restart the services running on the ESXi host, or restart the NFS storage server for the datastore, neither will fix this problem. We checked from the NFS storage server side, there appear to be no mkdir command come in to the NFS server.
What is strange is, if I run mkdir with a new VM name, it will succeeded, and after that, I will be able to create the VM or mkdir with the VM name which was failing before.
Wonder if anyone have experience similar problem in 6.7, we have not seen this in 6.5 setups. Thanks.