Over the last weekend I finally got some time to fix my broken RAID5 in my home lab. After disk was created, I was unable to add any of the local disks to my ESXi host as VMFS datastores as I got the error “HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions” for object ‘ha-datastoresystem’ on ESXi….”.

I’d used this host and the same disks previously, so I knew hardware incompatibility wasn’t an issue.

I guess the issue with pre-existing or incompatible information on the hard disks. There are various situations which might lead to pre-existing info on the disk.

You need to run the following command for each disk that you’re having issues with (this overwrites the partition table with a standard msdos one which VMware can work with);

NOTE: This will ERASE ALL DATA on the disk in question so be careful to select the right disks!

# partedUtil mklabel /dev/disks/<disk id> msdos 

To get a list of your disks;

/dev/disks
ls