After reusing hosts from decommissioned vSAN cluster the new cluster reports inaccessible objects in the vSAN object health alert.

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

After reusing hosts that were removed from a vSAN cluster, the cluster they are added to begins reporting inaccessible vSAN objects with "Unknown object type" in the Skyline health Data check.

The list of these objects can be identified from an ssh session to any host in the cluster with command

esxcli vsan debug object list --health=inaccessible

Environment

vSAN 7.x

vSAN 8.x

Cause

The disk groups were not removed from the hosts when the hosts were decommissioned from the previous cluster. This leaves data components available related to objects from the old cluster which are picked up by vSAN in the new cluster. Without enough components to meet quorum requirements the objects are reported as inaccessible.

Resolution

Prevent the issue from occurring by following KB 392097 when decommissioning a vSAN cluster or KB 326861 when removing a single node from a vSAN cluster.

To address the problem you may choose to perform one of the following to remove the inaccessible objects:

1. Decommission the vSAN datastore in the new cluster using KB 392097 and then re-enable vSAN and recreate the disk groups.
2. Storage vMotion any VMs or data required out of the vSAN datastore, place all hosts into maintenance mode with the No data migration option, remove all vSAN disk groups, recreate the disk groups.
3. Open a case to work with support to delete the inaccessible objects manually.