vSAN Object Store Integrity Issue Resolution causing object with reduced-availability-with-no-rebuild-delay-timer status

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Administrators managing infrastructure workloads backed by a vSAN datastore may encounter localized file system execution failures or corrupted storage properties where a specific Virtual Machine (VM) disk object becomes permanently locked, unreadable, or out of sync within the Cassandra object store layer.

Typical symptoms include 

• inability to perform standard snapshot consolidation
• snapshot creation failures
• localized storage latency on the affected VM objects.

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) All Versions

vSphere Foundation (VVF) All Versions

VMware vSAN OSA All Versions

VMware vSAN ESA All Versions

Cause

A critical disruption in block structural tracking or metadata allocation within the localized storage layer has compromised the integrity of the underlying vSAN storage object, making raw descriptors non-remediable through standard in-place diagnostic rule runs.

Resolution

To bypass the degraded object block and completely regenerate the storage state layout within the vSAN cluster, perform a full clone of the Virtual Machine using the following procedure:

1. Power Off the Virtual Machine:
2. Gracefully shut down the guest operating system of the target Virtual Machine to ensure disk state consistency.
3. Execute the Clone Operation:
4. Right-click the affected Virtual Machine in the vSphere Client inventory and select Clone > Clone to Virtual Machine.
5. Complete the wizard configuration steps, ensuring the clone target points to a healthy storage policy placement within the vSAN datastore.

The cloning engine will rebuild a clean, uncorrupted vSAN object block framework from the baseline allocation map.

Verify the Rebuilt Workload:

1. Power on the net-new cloned Virtual Machine.
2. Verify guest operating system boot integrity, network configuration routing parameters, and generic application functionality.
3. Decommission the Original Workload:
4. Once full data availability and target state performance are verified on the cloned instance, locate the original corrupted Virtual Machine in the inventory.
5. Right-click the original VM and select Delete from Disk to purge the orphaned/corrupted object directories and reclaim datastore space.

Note: Customers hold the ultimate execution responsibility for executing deletion operations within their production block storage.