Drives not available to be claimed when creating vSAN cluster

Products

• VMware vSAN
• VMware vSAN 7.x
• VMware vSAN 8.x

Issue/Introduction

Drives were not available to be claimed during vSAN Cluster creation.

ESXi hosts were added to the vSphere cluster, But when tried to configure vSAN, in the claim disks step, there are several disks not showing up to be configured.
Same disks were showing in the Storage Devices section of the host. Just not available in the vSAN config.

In the vCenter Server UI, under host reporting, disk were marked as ineligible. When selecting the disk under Storage Devices in configure tab, no old partition details are shown, and the section appears blank.

Environment

VMware vSAN 7.x
VMware vSAN 8.x

Cause

Due to an already existing GPT partition which is in a faulted state vSAN is unable to claim the disk as part of the new disk group.

# partedUtil getptbl "/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.####################
Error: Both the primary and backup GPT tables are corrupt.  Try making a fresh table and using Parted's rescue feature to recover partitions.
Unable to read partition table for device /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.##################

A new disk should not have any partitions if it does contain partitions then the disk won't be eligible for use by vSAN.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, follow these steps:

1. Check the disk for the current partition details:

   # partedUtil getptbl "/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.####################
Error: Both the primary and backup GPT tables are corrupt.  Try making a fresh table and using Parted's rescue feature to recover partitions.
Unable to read partition table for device /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.##################

2. Need to create a new MS-DOS partition on the affected disk(s). This would Overwrite the faulted GPT table with msdos:

   # partedUtil mklabel /dev/disks/naa.####################  msdos

   NOTE: This will ERASE ALL DATA on the disk in question so be careful to select the right disks

3. Confirm the GPT label has changed to MSDOS:

   # partedUtil getptbl "/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.####################
msdos
291841 255 63 4688430768

4. Now the disk can be claimed via vCenter to be added to the disk group.