Unable to start EPD service on vSAN hosts leads to vSAN health object warnings

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

- This article provides troubleshooting steps to get the EPD service running if it will not start
- EPD (Entry Persistence Daemon) is a user space daemon that runs on every host that is part of the vSAN cluster. The main job of EPD is to make sure there is no component leakage when objects are deleted.

 

Symptoms:

- EPD service is not running
- Unable to start EPD service 
- No logs listing at /var/log

Environment

VMware vSAN 6.x

VMware vSAN 7.x

VMware vSAN 8.x

Cause

- Scratch partition issues cause the EPD service to fail. The EPD service writes to an epd.db file on /scratch.
-If /scratch is not available the EPD service cannot start. 

Resolution

Follow KB Storing ESXi coredump and scratch partitions in vSAN (2074026) to set up a scratch partition for a vSAN cluster.

If there are problems with the above you may need to recreate the .locker file as per KB Manually setting a scratch location for ESXi in the vSphere Client appears to succeed but the setting is not honored (2003678).