Inaccurate Force Takeover Precheck Result

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

The force takeover precheck report may display outdated virtual machine names or display other non-VM used vSAN namespaces as virtual machine entities.

• If a virtual machine has been renamed, the force takeover precheck report will display its original name rather than the updated one.
• This occurs because, during recovery, the VM’s owner host information is unavailable, preventing the system from retrieving the new VM name.
• In such cases, the VM name is derived from the VM’s namespace object.
• However, the namespace object does not reflect name changes after the VM is renamed, which can lead to discrepancies between the reported and actual VM names.
• Besides, if there are vSAN namespaces and virtual disk objects that are not created for VM usage, it is possible that the force takeover precheck also counts them as virtual machine entities since it has lost the information from VM owner hosts in the crashed site.
• The force takeover precheck may report certain VMs as recoverable; however, these VMs may not be fully recoverable during actual execution, and the reported recoverability status may be inaccurate.
• In the event of a site disaster, the precheck process relies solely on object metadata to associate objects with their corresponding VMs. Because the components for these objects are located in the failed site and therefore unavailable, the objects cannot be grouped with any namespace.
• As a result, the list of recoverable VMs may be inaccurate.

Environment

VMware vSAN 9.0 and future releases

Resolution

• No action is required. This article is for informational purposes to explain the logic behind the "Inaccurate Force Takeover Precheck" notification.
• Please maintain an independent list of VM names. Manually cross-reference this list against the precheck results to verify inventory accuracy before proceeding.