How to fix “inaccessible” virtual machines in VMware ESX

Occasionally my storage goes offline, this can put VMware ESXi into a bit of a spin if your VM guests are hosted on the storage that went offline. The guests on the datastore will be greyed out with “(inaccessible)” next to them. There is a quick and easy way to fix this, by restarting the management service on the host(s) that the vm guests reside on. (Run these commands without the “#”).
  1. Shell or console onto the host
  2. #/etc/init.d/hostd restart
  3. exit
  4. Close the vsphere client
  5. Open the vsphere client
This won’t take effect immediately (up to 5 minutes), but it will come back.
You can check to see if the hostd service is running:
  1. #ps aux | grep hostd
If that doesn’t work you can try and reboot your vCenter server or at the very least, restart the services on the vCenter server. If that doesn’t work you will have to migrate the guests off the physical host and restart the host. Obviously the latter is drastic so only perform that action should you have no other options.
Should you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to comment below. If you like what you have read, please share it on your favourite social media medium.

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