AppStack vmdks on vSAN datastore show compliance status as 'unknown'

Products

• VMware
• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Policy for App VOLs vmdk on a vSAN Datastore shows as "unknown" or "out of date".
• Attempting to re-apply storage policy to the vmdk fails, you may see an error similar to:

Status: Storage policy changes cannot be applied on non-persistent disks while the virtual machine is running.

Environment

VMware App Volumes 2.x
VMware App Volumes 3.x

Cause

Assigning a non-persistent disk to a powered-on VM is a core requirement for App Volumes. Applying or re-applying a storage policy to a non-persistent disk while VM is powered on is not possible.

Resolution

This is expected behaviour and does not affect the functionality. An AppVols Disk is created with default policy settings of the vSAN datastore. A storage policy cannot be applied on this AppVolume disk.

So the compliance status that is shown on the UI can be safely ignored.

Workaround:

​An APPVOLs vmdk is a normal vSAN object however, so any component loss will be alarmed, and dealt with by vSAN the same as any other object.

To manually check compliance on an App VOLs vmdk, you can use RVC

vsan.object_info. <UUID of APP VOLS vmdk>  run at cluster level, shows the information required.