sorry for the angry headline of this post ....
recently I see a frightening increase of a special error that renders VMs absolutely unusable because files are locked or corrupt.
I thought it was limited to VMFS 3 and ESX(i) 4.1
Today I saw the first case with ESXi 5 using VMFS 5.
here is the relevant example message:
vmx| FileIOErrno2Result: Unexpected errno=22, Invalid argument
vmx| AIOGNRC: Failed to open '/vmfs/volumes/4ebc15b1-f6959917-842f-0019b9eebb39/SBSSERVER.spoka.local/SBSSERVER.spoka.local-flat.vmdk' : Invalid argument (1600000002) (0x2013).
vmx| DISKLIB-VMFS : "/vmfs/volumes/4ebc15b1-f6959917-842f-0019b9eebb39/SBSSERVER.spoka.local/SBSSERVER.spoka.local-flat.vmdk" : failed to open (Invalid argument): AIOMgr_Open failed. Type 3
vmx| DISKLIB-LINK : "/vmfs/volumes/4ebc15b1-f6959917-842f-0019b9eebb39/SBSSERVER.spoka.local/SBSSERVER.spoka.local.vmdk" : failed to open (Invalid argument).
vmx| DISKLIB-CHAIN : "/vmfs/volumes/4ebc15b1-f6959917-842f-0019b9eebb39/SBSSERVER.spoka.local/SBSSERVER.spoka.local.vmdk" : failed to open (Invalid argument).
vmx| DISKLIB-LIB : Failed to open '/vmfs/volumes/4ebc15b1-f6959917-842f-0019b9eebb39/SBSSERVER.spoka.local/SBSSERVER.spoka.local.vmdk' with flags 0xa Invalid argument (1441801).
vmx| DISK: Cannot open disk "/vmfs/volumes/4ebc15b1-f6959917-842f-0019b9eebb39/SBSSERVER.spoka.local/SBSSERVER.spoka.local.vmdk": Invalid argument (1441801).
vmx| Msg_Post: Error
If you get this error with VMFS 3 you can still download the vmdks with a Linux LiveCD.
On VMFS 5 there is nothing left to do other than reformat the datastore !!!
For now I will warn any user NOT to use VMFS 5