VMs were not able to power on and show inaccessible

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Unable to power on virtual machines after storage policy changes in vSAN Stretched cluster.
• The initial data placement for objects occurred on the non-preferred site. The storage policy on the virtual machine was later modified to retain data on the preferred site only. However, the secondary site hosts were shut down while the resynchronization was still in progress 

          "The VM failed to resume on the destination during early power on. Module Disk power on failed. Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/vsan:525e22e87d68###-5b9bc628fc99e####/1d39ae##-e4##-33##-##############/test_2-000001.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
       The system cannot find the file specified File system specific implementation of GetFileAttributes[file] failed File system specific implementation of GetFileAttributes[file]"

 

Environment

VMware vSAN 7.x

Vmware vSAN 8.x

Cause

• The vSAN storage policy for all virtual machines was updated to store data solely on the preferred site
•  All hosts at the secondary site are powered off during resync, causing temporary data unavailability
• The output below shows objects in an absent state while the secondary site hosts remained powered off
•  The CLI output indicates that the objects are associated with a 'non-preferred' policy setting 

    localcli vsan debug object list --vm-name="test"

   Object UUID: 2039ae65-a253-cf2a-ca48-############:
   Version: 20
   Health: inaccessible - Lost data availability.(APD)
   Owner: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
   subFailuresToTolerate: 1
   spbmProfileName: Corby vSAN - Works locality
   locality: NonPreferred
   Object UUID: 2139ae65-bcaf-f182-cca0-############
    locality: NonPreferred

   Configuration:
      RAID_1
         Component: 2139a###-4e##-a3##-ff##-############
           Component State: ABSENT,  Address Space(B): 96636764160 (90.00GB),  Disk UUID: 5254006f-18##-80b5-58##-252193c32###,  Disk Name: N/A
           Votes: 1,  Host UUID: None
         Component: 2139a###-ae##-a5##-10##-############
           Component State: ACTIVE,  Address Space(B): 96636764160 (90.00GB),  Disk UUID: 52b3da56-33##-8be5-f2##-8b344393e###,  Disk Name: N/A
           Votes: 1,  Host UUID: None
      Witness: d66db###-7a##-07##-############
        Component State: ABSENT,  CSN: STALE (2493!=2536),  Address Space(B): 0 (0.00GB),  Disk UUID: 528098cf-c5##-0c30-f6##-4fac6f3ec###,  Disk Name: N/A
        Votes: 1,  Host UUID: None

         

Resolution

• To resolve the data availability issue, the secondary site hosts must be brought online to ensure virtual machines are accessible