All the VMs are invalid and inaccessible and orphaned

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

All Virtual Machines in a vSAN cluster appear as "Invalid" or "Orphaned" and are inaccessible. When connecting to one of the participating ESXi hosts through SSH and running esxcli vsan debug object health summary get the report shows zero healthy vSAN objects. 

esxcli vsan debug object health summary get
    Health Status                                     Number Of Objects
    ------------------------------------------------  -----------------
    reduced-availability-with-no-rebuild-delay-timer                  0
    reduced-availability-with-active-rebuild                          0
    inaccessible                                                      0
    data-move                                                         0
    healthy                                                           0
    nonavailability-related-incompliance                              0
    nonavailability-related-reconfig                                  0
    reduced-availability-with-no-rebuild                              0

 

Additional diagnostics reveal that ESXi hosts are unable to ping each other over the vSAN network interface. See Troubleshooting vSAN networking

Environment

vSAN 8.x

vSAN 9.x

Cause

The root cause is a VLAN configuration mismatch between the vSphere Port Group and the upstream physical switch.

The vSAN Port Group is configured with a specific VLAN tag (e.g., VLAN 10), but the corresponding ports on the upstream physical switch are not configured to allow traffic for that VLAN. This mismatch blocks all vSAN traffic at the physical switch port, causing a complete network partition and rendering all vSAN objects inaccessible.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, the configuration must be corrected on the physical network equipment. Engage the on-premise network support team to check the upstream switch and correct the VLAN configuration. No changes on the vSAN configuration are required.