Performing hardware maintenance on a single host in a VSA Cluster

VMware vSphere ESXi

This article provides the steps to perform maintenance on a single host in a VSA Cluster.

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0.x
VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x
VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.5.x

This procedure is based on these assumptions:

The goal is to perform a maintenance operation on Host A which requires an outage on the host.
Host A and B are in a two-node cluster, each having one or more virtual machines registered and running.
A VSA appliance named VSA-1 is running on host A, and an appliance named VSA-0 is running on host B.

To perform maintenance on Host A:

Select the VSA datacenter object in vCenter, then click the VSA Manager tab and click the Appliances view.
Right-click VSA-1, then click Enter Appliance Maintenance Mode.
After the completed message for this task is displayed, refresh the page to verify that the appliance is in Maintenance Mode.

Note: In the Appliances view, VSA-1 is shown in Maintenance Mode. In the Datastores view, the VSADs-0 and VSADs-1 datastores are both shown as Degraded.
Migrate all virtual machines from Host A to Host B, or power them off, as convenient.
Right-click Host A and click Enter Maintenance Mode.
After host A is in Maintenance Mode, power it off and perform the required maintenance task.

Note: During this time, datastores VSADs-0 and VSADs-1 are both available and can be browsed and accessed from Host B.
After the maintenance task is complete, power on Host A.
After Host A has connected to vCenter, right-click the host and click Exit Maintenance Mode.
Power on VSA-1.
Select the VSA datacenter object in vCenter Server, click the VSA Manager tab, and click the Appliances view.
Right-click VSA-1 and click Exit Appliance Maintenance Mode. A popup appears indicating that the appliance is exiting maintenance mode. In Recent Tasks, a VSA Storage Data synchronization task begins.

After logging out of vSphere and logging back in again, you see:

In the Appliances view, VSA-0 and VSA-1 are both Online.
Until the VSA Storage Data synchronization task is complete, the VSADs-0 datastore is shown as Degraded and the VSADs-1 datastore is shown as Online in the Datastores view.

Notes:

You may have to log out of the vSphere Client and then log in again to get the current status. In some cases, the Refresh Page option may not fully refresh all status displays.
Cancelling the synchronization task from the vSphere Client does not necessarily stop the underlying service from syncing. After the sync task completes, it stops and removes the datastore's degraded status. This is an expected behavior and this is a core function of the VSA.

To confirm sync status, issue this command from a SSH session from the cluster primary type:

# wscli localhost getstoragecluster

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