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

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

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

Error: vSAN physical disk alarm 'Operation'

In Disk Management under the vSAN Cluster the Disk group entry shows as Unhealthy with Health status as "--"

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. The failed vSAN disk is replaced but 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 deduplication is enabled or if it's a failed cache tier disk.

Resolution

• Once the physical disk identified as faulty is located, follow the steps outlined in the article: How to troubleshoot vSAN OSA disk issues
• If still unable to remove the faulty disk or delete the 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, the error persists in the Skyline Health check displaying the UUID of the removed disk, follow the steps in the article Unable to delete Absent Disk with UUID via vSphere UI or command line.

Additional Information

You may find the UUID of the disk in the UI in the Skyline health check in the Operation Health alert.