The Last Octet

I've recently observed a strange issue when adding new datastores to an ESX (3.5) host. In this case, I've seen the issue occur with NFS datastores. What happens is that an NFS export can be added to a host without any problems. When that same NFS export is added to a second host and given the same datastore name as the datastore on the first host, the datastore name is appended with a (1).

I’ve tested this scenario with and without VirtualCenter managing the hosts. When the hosts are unmanaged they except the common datastore name without the (1) being appended. When those hosts are added to Virtual Center one of the datastores is automatically renamed with a (1) appended to its original name.

I've read several forum postings in which others have had similar issues in their environment. It seems that many have been able to resolve the problem by deleting old datastores from the "Datastore" view within VirtualCenter. Unfortunately, there aren't any orphaned datastore names for me to remove.

I had suspected that since each host accessed the NFS server over different IP subnets that VirtualCenter was assuming each host was accessing a unique datastore (because I was providing a different server IP for each ESX host). I masked these differing IP’s by adding them to the hosts file of each ESX host. In my case the NFS server was added as nas1.domainname.com to each host. Unfortunately the issue continued to exist with this configuration.

As it stands now I'm a bit stumped, but I'll be sure to post any positive findings I come up with.