ESXi hosts come back into a separate cluster partition after being rebooted

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After completing upgrade of the ESXi software and rebooting host, the host would not join the cluster.

Host partition would also manifest with just regular host reboot operation.

Environment

vSAN 8.0x

Cause

Hosts were out of sync with vSAN Data in Transport Encryption Cluster level setting. I.E. vSAN Cluster DIT is set to disabled but the ESXi host were set to enabled. 

Resolution

 

Use esxcli command to disable DIT on each host and reboot.

Connect to the hosts with SSH.

1. Perform `esxcli vsan network security set -e false` on host.

2. Check 'Data-in-Transit Encryption status' is false by performing command

 

esxcli vsan network security get

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli vsan network security set -e false

[root@esxihost:~] esxcli vsan network security get
   Sub-Cluster UUID: ########-####-####-############
   Data-in-Transit Encryption status: false
   Rekey Interval (in minutes): 1440

This will ensure that Data in Transport Encryption is disabled and now in alignment with Cluster settings.