After performing a hot-add vRanger backup (the backup attempt has failed-over to LAN-mode every time), the vRanger machine appears to have left a "ghost mounted" disk to itself. Upon logging-into the vRanger machine, the user is confronted with a "Disk X has not been formatted, would you like to format...?" prompt. Microsoft disk manager shows no mounted disk labeled X.
The VMware version being run may be vSphere (ESX) 4.0.0. Although some hot-add features were available in this release of ESX, many were not. The available APIs seem to be able to mount the drive via the vRanger API call to the Host/Virtual Center machine(s) , but do not appear to be able to do a true hot-add read from the machine. The backups failover to LAN mode (if failover in the vRanger job is selected), and complete in LAN mode, but the "phantom" drive is still visible somehow to Windows, though not through Windows Explorer or the Microsoft Disk Manager Utility.
1) Edit the backup job(s), and have them use "Manual" transport mode, "on this vRanger machine", and "LAN" instead of the hot-add options. This will prevent the hot-add mount operation from happenening against ESX 4.0.0 in the first place.
2) OR, upgrade the VM-side software to a revision of VMware ESX(i) that supports the full hot-add capability, if hot-add capability is desired (vSphere 4.1 or vSphere 5).
