Removing stale reference to an old remotely mounted vSAN datastore

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

If a remotely mounted (HCI Mesh/vSAN Max) datastore is destroyed before the supported method to unmount the datastore is used, then a stale reference may be left on the host that was mounting the datastore. 

Environment

vSAN using HCIMesh / vSAN Max

Cause

In this situation, even after all attempts have been made to unmount the datastore (and it may initially appear to be gone), a reference to it may be re-pushed to the host after reboot.

 

Resolution

To View the UUID for the remote datastore see the below pictured command and the output in green (important to double check this is the correct datastore to remove):

 

In order to remove the remotely mounted, and already destroyed vSAN Datastore reference, the user should follow these steps, and in this specific order:

esxcli vsan datastore remove -u <<UUID OF DS to be removed>>

then.....

esxcli vsan cluster leave

then.....

esxcli vsan cluster get

 

The reference to the old datastore is now gone, this is permanent and will not return after reboot.

 

NOTE: Please note that the commands above are potentially damaging if used in the wrong scenario, and should only be used in the above situation.