Enabling or disabling a vSAN cluster

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to enable or disable vSAN.

For documentation of the procedure and considerations for specific versions, refer to the VMware docs guides:

vSAN 7.0: Enabling vSAN

vSAN 8.0: Enabling vSAN

For more information, see the vSphere documentation. The documentation contains definitive information. If there is a discrepancy between the documentation and this article, assume that the documentation is correct.

Resolution

Prerequisites

• Verify that the  environment meets all hardware requirements. All hardware must be on the VMware HCL. Also all disks and HBA controller must be on the VMware vSAN-specific HCL.
• Ensure that vSAN networking has been configured. For more information, see Configuring vSAN VMkernel Networking.
• For best performance, the environment should be designed for the specific workload intended to be run on the cluster.

Enabling vSAN

Enabling vSAN creates a vSAN datastore and registers the vSAN storage provider. The vSAN storage provider communicates the storage capabilities of the datastore to vCenter Server. Currently, there are no third-party storage providers.

To enable vSAN on an existing cluster:

1. Open the vSphere Web Client.
2. Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
3. Select the cluster name intended to have vSAN enabled.
4. Validate vSphere HA is disabled on the cluster via Configure > Services > vSphere Availability, if not then temporarily disable it (and re-enable it after enabling vSAN) via Configure > Services > vSphere Availability > Edit > slider to off > OK
5. Click the Configure tab.
6. Under vSAN, select Services, click Turn on vSAN, and then follow the wizard.
7. Click OK.

Disabling vSAN

Warning: When disabling the vSAN cluster, all virtual machines located on the shared vSAN datastore become inaccessible. If intending to use a virtual machine while vSAN is disabled, make sure to migrate virtual machines from vSAN datastore to another datastore before disabling the vSAN cluster. 

Note for stretched clusters (including 2-node), disable the stretch and remove the witness per the following documentation prior to the steps below.

To disable vSAN on the cluster:

1. Open the vSphere Web Client.
2. Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
3. Select the cluster intended to have vSAN disabled.
4. Validate vSphere HA is disabled on the cluster via Configure > Services > vSphere Availability, if not then temporarily disable it (and re-enable it after disabling vSAN) via Configure > Services > vSphere Availability > Edit > slider to off > OK
5. Click the Configure tab.
6. Under vSAN select Datastore Management, choose the VSAN datastore and unmount.
7. Under vSAN, select Services and click Turn off vSAN.
8. Click OK.

Additional Information