Removing a disk from vSphere giving an error

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

There is a bad disk , which is trying to be replace, however removing the disk from vSphere giving an errors.  Absent vsan disk, permanent disk loss. state dead or error.

Unable to remove a vSAN disk using vCenter. 
can not delete the failed drive from the storage group

vSAN disk is showing absent in the disk group and failed in vSAN health check
When trying to remove the disk from the disk group using vCenter it will fail or give errors 


When viewing the disk from command line using vdq -Hi it will display the disk as a UUID not a disk name naa.600000xxxxxxx

Example:

# vdq -Hi
Mappings:
   DiskMapping[0]:
           SSD:  naa.60000000000000000000000000000000
            MD:  naa.60000000000000000000000000000001
            MD:  naa.60000000000000000000000000000002
            MD:  naa.60000000000000000000000000000003
            MD:  naa.60000000000000000000000000000004
            MD:  naa.60000000000000000000000000000005
            MD:  naa.60000000000000000000000000000006
            MD:  12345678-1234-1234-####-############ ------> Failed disk entry 

Environment

vSAN 

Cause

In some cases when a disk is absent and no longer visible vCenter is unable to remove the disk from the disk group. 

Resolution

Place the host in to maintenance mode with insure accessibility though vCenter. 
Using the vCenter health check confirm no objects are inaccessible .

Remove the disk using the UUID with the following CLI command 

esxcli vsan storage remove -u <UUID>

The UUID can be found as per above by using the command vdq -Hi

Additional Information

More information on command line instructions to manage the disks.
How to manually manage and configure a vSAN disk group using esxcli commands