PVCs disappear from Container Volumes section in vCenter

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

When an ESXi host mounting datastores containing CNS volumes is moved from one datacenter to another, all volumes on that datastore are removed from the vCenter "Container Volumes" section.

2025-08-01T01:01:01.001Z info vsanvcmgmtd[XXX] [vSAN@XXX sub=CnsVolCache opID=vsan-XXX] Removed XXXX-XXXX from volume info cache 

Environment

vCenter 7.x, 8.x

CSI Driver 2.x, 3.x

Cause

Moving an ESXi host across datacenter objects triggers a datastore removal event. CNS removes volumes based on moid removal, even though the FCD URL is still accessible by vCenter. Since that URL is still in the VCDB, its vclock is not reset to -1 thus periodic sync of the volumes thinks itself is up-to-date. This causes the volumes to lose sync and be removed from the vCenter UI.

Resolution

Perform a resync of the datastore(s) containing the PVCs as per the following KB;
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/383797/

A permanent fix to this issue will be included in a future vCenter release. Subscribe to this KB or review vCenter release notes for updates. 

Additional Information

To workaround the issue, and avoid the PVCs disappearing from the UI, you can employ one of the following three workarounds;

1. Unmount all datastores from the moving host before moving
2. Change the set up from 2 virtual datacenters, to 2 clusters within 1 virtual datacenter
3. Don't make the moving host the last one to exit, always leave 1 host having connectivity to the PVC datastores in the source datacenter