vCenter Hard Disk 2 shows 'none' under Partition and 'Not available' under Utilization section, on VAMI page

Products

• VMware vCenter Server 8.0

Issue/Introduction

vCenter VAMI UI shows Hard Disk 2 as 'none' and Utilization as 'Not available'. Status remains same for standalone or ELM based vCenter.

 

Environment

vCenter 7.x

vCenter 8.x

Cause

In VCSA, the letter in /dev/sdX follows the alphabetical order to indicate the sequence of hard disks detected by the system.

• a = Hard Disk 1 (/dev/sda)

• b = Hard Disk 2 (/dev/sdb)

• ...

• q is the 17th letter of the alphabet so sdq is Hard Disk 17

 

 This indicates that Hard Disk 2 is referencing to sdb.

It’s usually provisioned during the initial appliance setup to support future system expansion or upgrades (for example, extra space for partitions in vSphere upgrades or migration tasks).

Since Hard Disk 2 has no filesystem or mount point, the VAMI UI cannot query utilization metrics. In certain vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) deployment sizes (like the "tiny" or specific versions), Hard Disk 2 (often identified as /dev/sdb in the OS) is sometimes allocated for specific temporary file systems (like /tmp, which may be a tmpfs and monitored differently) or other functions that do not report standard usage statistics in the VAMI's summary view.

That’s why the Partition field shows 'none' and Utilization shows 'Not available'.

Resolution

The "Not Available" status for Hard Disk 2 utilization in the VAMI (vCenter Appliance Management Interface) usually indicates that the disk is present but not actively used or mounted as a standard filesystem partition that the VAMI monitors for general usage. 

This is normal and expected behavior for the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and can be ignored safely.