Resolve inaccessible orphaned vSAN objects left by deleted VDI instances

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Your environment utilizing automated deployment pools may report lingering or inaccessible vSAN storage objects after virtual machines or automated pools are dropped.

These components present as capacity usage errors or inaccessible storage states during health checks.

Environment

vSAN 8.x

Cause

Bulk automated deletion tasks can introduce asynchronous metadata synchronization gaps, resulting in orphaned object components remaining registered on disk while their parent configurations have been purged from the environment inventory.

Resolution

1. Authenticate to an affected ESXi host in the cluster using SSH.

2. Run the attribute command against the object UUID to ensure it belongs to an obsolete VM path: /usr/lib/vmware/osfs/bin/objtool getAttr -u <Object UUID> -bypassDom

3. Gather and isolate the problematic object IDs to a temporary local tracking manifest file: esxcli vsan debug object list --all --health=inaccessible | grep "Object UUID:" | cut -d ' ' -f3 > /tmp/inacc.txt

4. Run the following clean-up sequence to clear the objects from the system: for i in `cat /tmp/inacc.txt` ; do echo $i; /usr/lib/vmware/osfs/bin/objtool delete -u $i -f ; done`

NOTE: Always verify that the inaccessible objects are no longer needed before deleting them with objtool command. as this operation cannot be recovered.