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Create NAS datastore Error – NFS Setup on ESX 4.1

Trying to mount  an NFS datastore in vCenter I got the following Errors:

vCenter error dialog:

Operation failed, diagnostics report: Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.

/var/log/vmkernel errors:

NFS: 149: Command: (mount) Server: (10.0.0.10) IP: (10.0.0.10) Path: (/mnt/servers/vmdk/vmdk) Label: (DEV-SERVERS) Options: (None)
WARNING: NFS: 946: MOUNT RPC failed with RPC status 13 (RPC was aborted due to timeout) trying to mount Server (10.0.0.10) Path (/mnt/servers/vmdk/vmdk)
NFS: 160: NFS mount 10.0.0.10:/mnt/servers/vmdk/vmdk failed: Unable to connect to NFS server

This turned out to simply be caused by the filer, in this case OpenFiler, not being able to resolve the hostnames of the ESX hosts. The DNS servers it referenced were returning Data network IPs instead of Storage network IPs, which don't cross-talk in our environment.

The fix was to simply add entries to /etc/hosts on OpenFiler with the correct IPs:

10.0.0.54                              esx1 esx1.domain.local
10.0.0.55                              esx2 esx2.domain.local
10.0.0.56                              esx3 esx3.domain.local