Cannot disable DRS when the vCenter license has expired.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSAN 7.x

Issue/Introduction

During the evaluation window (60 days from deployment) the customer had DRS enabled,  and current situation is License expired.

Customer has only vCenter License Standard which does not support the DRS functionality.

Customer wants to turn off the DRS but on VC UI - DRS shows turned on and while trying to turn off DRS it shows the License invalid for this operation.

Environment

_{vCenter Server 7.0.3.01700 / ESXi 7.0.3 build-22348816}

_{vSAN- 7} 

Cause

The DRS feature is not supported when the License is expired , But vCenter UI shows DRS turned and not able to turn off as it shows the error - License not valid , 

Customer doesn't have vCenter Enterprise license and has only standard key. However customer do not want to use DRS at the moment and only wants to turn off the DRS feature as the Hosts are in disconnected state and cannot connect assign the Host license, as it says that the license doesn't support DRS.

Resolution

Tried to Drag the Hosts out of  the current cluster and tried to Turn of the DRS- It worked. 

 

To isolate the host and to save the vSAN configuration-  entered "esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /VSAN/IgnoreClusterMemberListupdates" on all 3 hosts

• checked esxcli vsan cluster get to confirm that we saw 3 members on each of the 3 hosts.
• removed 1 host at a time from vCenter, but between each host check the" esxcli vsan cluster get "again on all 3 hosts to confirm they all kept seeing 3 hosts.
• Tried to add hosts back to the Cluster. ( Could plan to move the VMs to diff host  put hosts into maintenance mode )

The issue resolved.

Manually Shut Down and Restart the vSAN cluster  ignoreclustermemberlistupdates (vmware.com)

vSAN recovery after vCenter failure | vSAN1 (broadcom.com)