Inaccurate Force Takeover Precheck Results in vSAN Stretched Cluster

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• The force takeover precheck report may display outdated virtual machine names or identify non-VM vSAN namespaces as virtual machine entities.
• If a virtual machine is renamed, the force takeover precheck report may continue to display the original virtual machine name instead of the updated name. This behavior occurs because the virtual machine owner host information is unavailable during the recovery process, which prevents retrieval of the updated virtual machine name. In such cases, the virtual machine name is obtained from the virtual machine namespace object. However, the namespace object does not reflect name changes made after the virtual machine is renamed, which can result in differences between the reported and actual virtual machine names.
• Additionally, if vSAN namespaces or virtual disk objects exist that are not associated with virtual machine usage, the force takeover precheck may identify them as virtual machine entities because the virtual machine owner host information from the failed site is unavailable.
• The force takeover precheck may report certain virtual machines as recoverable; however, the reported recoverability status may not always be accurate, and some virtual machines may not be fully recoverable during the actual recovery process.
• During a site failure scenario, the precheck process relies only on object metadata to associate objects with their corresponding virtual machines. Since the object components are located in the failed site and are inaccessible, the objects cannot be associated with a namespace object. As a result, the list of recoverable virtual machines generated during the precheck may be inaccurate.

Environment

• VMware vSAN 9.0 RPQ
• VMware vSAN 9.1 and future releases

Resolution

No action is required. This article is provided for informational purposes to explain the logic behind the "Inaccurate Force Takeover Precheck" notification.

Maintain a separate inventory of virtual machine names and manually compare it with the precheck results to verify inventory accuracy before proceeding.