Unable to Remove an Absent vSAN Disk via vCenter UI

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

After a physical vSAN disk has been replaced, the old, failed disk appears as "Absent" in the vCenter UI. Attempts to remove this disk from the vSAN disk group fail with the error: "General vSAN error. vSAN disk data evacuation resource check has failed for disk or disk-group vsan:########-####-####-####-############ (########-####-####-####-############) with mode noAction on host 10.x.x.4. Go to vSAN Data Migration Pre-Check page for more details.."

Environment

vSAN 8.x

Cause

The vSAN UI's disk removal process is designed to perform a data evacuation pre-check before removing a disk. This check fails because the disk is already "Absent" from the cluster, making data evacuation impossible. The error message is misleading, as the underlying cause is a logical inconsistency within the vCenter UI's workflow for failed disks.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you must use the ESXi command line to force the removal of the absent disk, bypassing the UI's failed resource check.

1. SSH to the ESXi host where the disk was located.

2. Run the command vdq -i to identify the UUID of the absent disk. (The absent disk outputs the last known disk UUID, highlighted in yellow)

Example: 

[esxi:]vdq -i 

[
   {
"SSD" : "naa.################",
       "MD" : [
              "naa.####################",
              "naa.####################",
              "naa.####################",
              "naa.####################",
              "naa.####################",
              "#######-####-####-####-############",
              ]
   },

     3. Execute the command esxcli vsan storage remove -u "########-####-####-####-############" to force the removal of the disk.

Additional Information

The vSAN disk appears as Absent in vSAN Disk Management