Datastore Browser Issue – Unable to browse the contents of any datastore

I recently came across an issue where I had to remove a Template and add it again because I was getting an error if I tried to edit the settings of it when it was converted back to a VM, the only fix I have found for this has been to remove the VM from the inventory and re-add it via the datastore browser.

As I haven’t had to do this much (in fact this was the first time I did have to do this) I haven’t come across the particular issue where when I tried to re-add the VM back in to vCenter I tried browsing to my datastore and discovered it was blank.

No matter which datastore I tried to look at they all showed the same thing (in this instance obviously… nothing).

To see if there was actually an issue with the datastores themselves I then opened up Veeam FastSCP and much to my expectations I could see the contents of the datastore, whilst that was good in one way it still meant I had an issue with the datastore browser on my vSphere client.

I should add at this stage that I am using the ThinApp’d vSphere client that I created in an earlier video and for the most part the client has been rock solid (more on that in a later post) but I did wonder if this was something caused by me or whether this was something else so I jumped across to my management pc (which has the fat client installed) and discovered the same issues on the fat client (great, in this instance I discovered that my ThinApp’d client wasn’t at fault) but that left another question, what was causing it.

A quick trawl through Google and the VMTN boards didn’t really throw up any ideas so for a couple of minutes it left me scratching my head when it suddenly hit me, I had experienced issues with my cluster recently that was caused by DPM having powered down one of my cluster nodes and sure enough I had that same server in standby mode this time as well.

A quick power on of the server (ensuring that DPM was switched to Manual rather than automatic) and re-launching the datastore browser suddenly gave me a completely different view of my datastores

In conclusion, if you’re using DPM to power manage your servers and you experience issues with the datastore browser, you may want to try powering on all your hosts and try launching the browser again, this isn’t the first time that I have experienced issues with DPM and whilst I love the idea behind it I am now aware that it can cause spurious issues in your datacentre if you’re not careful.