Inaccessible vSAN objects after migrating hosts to different location

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Objects are in inaccessible after migrating two-node vSAN ROBO cluster to a different physical location.
  
  
• Witness for vSAN cluster is at far-off site from the new location of data nodes.
  
  
• vSAN Cluster has partitioned.
  
  
• As part of troubleshooting, vSAN is disabled and re-enabled from vSphere Client (vSAN Cluster > Configure > Services).

Environment

vSphere vSAN 7.x

vSphere vSAN 8.x

Cause

• As part of troubleshooting to fix the vSAN cluster partitioning and inaccessible objects, vSAN is turned-off mistakenly from vCenter UI.
  
  
• Re-enabling vSAN created a new vSAN datastore (with UUID changed).
  
  
• This resulted in all objects showing missing paths due to UUID mismatch.
  
  E.g.
  
  # Missing paths of these objects is shown in following truncated output of command : 
  
  'esxcli vsan debug object list'
 
Used:
  13950255104
Used 4K Blocks:
  13883105280
Size:
  2147483648000
Type:
  vdisk
Path:
  /vmfs/volumes/vsan:<old-UUID>/########-####-####-####-############/<VM>.vmdk (Missing)
  
  

Resolution

If these symptoms match, please contact Broadcom Support logging a support case for further assistance.