Inaccessible vSAN Objects After Adding Repurposed Host

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

After adding a repurposed ESXi host to your vSAN cluster, you observe inaccessible objects in the Skyline or Object Health view that persist despite purge operations.

 

You can verify the source of the issue by comparing disk group creation timestamps; the problematic host will have disk groups created at different times than the rest of the cluster, indicating a legacy configuration.

When you check Skyline health, the cluster is healthy and no hosts are in maintenance mode or decom state. 

Environment

vSAN 8.x

Cause

The repurposed host retained stale disk groups and metadata from a previous vSAN cluster. Your current cluster detects this foreign metadata and flags the referenced—but non-existent—objects as inaccessible.

Resolution

You must clear the stale configuration to resolve the object status.

• Place the repurposed host into Maintenance Mode.
• Navigate to Configure > vSAN > Disk Management.
• Remove the disk group associated with the repurposed host.
• Note: Select "No Data Migration" since the data belongs to a previous deployment.
• Recreate the disk group. This formats the drives and generates metadata consistent with your current cluster.
• Exit Maintenance Mode. The inaccessible objects will clear.