Cannot claim New Capacity Disks to be part of vSAN Disk Group

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

• Unable to Claim New Capacity disk to be part of a vSAN disk group.
• When trying to erase partitions via Remove Partition From Devices  the new disk does not show under Ineligible / Unclaimed device
• When trying to erase partitions via Erase ESXi Storage Devices you see no disk partitions.
• You see the following error when trying to claim the disk on vCenter screen.

• • Error :
  • Create disk group on vSAN esxihost1

A general system error occurred: unable to create partition table

In VMkernel logs we see the Errors:

2024-08-07T20:14:22.910Z cpu42:2101360)Partition: 572: GUID Partition Entry Array CRC invalid for device "naa.50000#########45". origCrc=0xacf929aa calculated=0x7c988345. hdrlba=1
2024-08-07T20:14:22.910Z cpu42:2101360)Partition: 683: Read from primary gpt table failed on "naa.50000#########45".
2024-08-07T20:14:22.923Z cpu42:2101360)Partition: 689: Read from both primary and secondary gpt table failed on "naa.50000#########45".
2024-08-07T20:14:22.923Z cpu42:2101360)WARNING: Partition: 1289: Partition table read from device naa.50000#########45 failed: Failure

Environment

 VMware vSAN (All Versions)

Cause

Due to an already existing GPT partition which is in a faulted state vSAN is unable to claim the disk as part of the new disk group.

A new disk should not have any partitions if it does contain partitions then the disk won't be eligible for use by vSAN.

 

 

 

 

Resolution

To resolve this we need to create a new MS-DOS partition on the affected disk(s).

1) Check the disk for the current partition details:

[root@HOST:~] partedUtil getptbl "/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.500000#########"
Error: Both the primary and backup GPT tables are corrupt.  Try making a fresh table, and using Parted's rescue feature to recover partitions.
Unable to read partition table for device /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.500000#########

2) Overwrite the faulted GPT table with msdos:

Command:

partedUtil mklabel /dev/disks/naa.500000#########  msdos

NOTE: This will ERASE ALL DATA on the disk in question so be careful to select the right disks!

3) Confirm the GPT label has changed to MSDOS:

[root@HOST:] partedUtil getptbl "/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50000#########"
msdos
291841 255 63 4688430768

4) Now you can claim the disk via vCenter to be added to the disk group.