Alarm triggered in vCenter Server "vSAN physical disk alarm 'Operation'"

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms

• An alarm is triggered in the vCenter server for a failed disk.

Error: vSAN physical disk alarm 'Operation'.

• In Disk Management under vSAN Cluster following error is observed:

 

Environment

VMware vSAN 7.x

VMware vSAN 8.x

 

 

Cause

This can be caused by the following reasons:

1. The disk has gone completely offline, and the ESXi host is unable to communicate with it.
2. We see this issue when the failed vSAN disk is replaced but somehow the stale disk entry is not flushed from the vSAN CMMDS data. This typically happens when the customer replaces the failed disk prior to removing it from the vSAN disk group or remove the disk group if dedup is enabled or if it's a failed cache tier disk.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, follow these steps:

• Once the physical disk identified as faulty is located, follow the steps outlined in the article:   How to troubleshoot vSAN OSA disk issues
• If you’re still unable to remove the faulty disk or delete a vSAN disk group, refer to the article:   Cannot delete a vSAN disk group or remove the disk after detecting it as faulty
• In rare cases, after replacing the faulty disk and creating a new disk group with the newly added disk, if the error persists in the Skyline Health of the vSAN cluster and shows the UUID of the old faulty disk, follow the steps in the article Unable to delete Absent Disk with UUID via vSphere UI or command line.
• This will guide you in validating the UUID of the disk reported in the UI and removing the stale entry.

• However, in the vSAN cluster's disk management, the host is reporting as healthy.

• If the stale UUID is still reported in the skyline health, then proceed with the host reboot after putting the host in maintenance mode Place a member of vSAN Cluster in Maintenance Mode
• Following above steps will ensure that the faulty disk is properly removed from the system, and the UUID associated with it is cleared.