NVMe drives appear as ineligible for vSAN or show as offline in vSphere

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Introduction

NVMe drives appear as ineligible for vSAN or show as offline in vSphere. Standard attempts to clear partitions or format the device fail with errors indicating the device size is too small or invalid.

Symptoms:

• NVMe drive flagged as Ineligible in vSAN Disk Management.
• vdq -q reports Reason: Has partitions. 

"Name" :"t10.NVMe____MT####################_________________254##############

",
"VSANUUID" : "",
"State" : "Ineligible for use by VSAN",
"Reason" : "Has partitions",
"StoragePoolState": "Ineligible for use by Storage Pool",
"StoragePoolReason": "Has partitions",
"IsSSD" : "1",
"IsCapacityFlash": "0",
"IsPDL" : "0",
"Size(MB)" : "3662830",
"FormatType" : "512e",
"IsVsanDirectDisk" : "0"

• Attempts to run partedUtil mklabel or setptbl return: The device is so small that it can not possibly store a file system or partition table.
• NVMe controllers appear Offline in esxcli nvme device list.

 

Environment

• VMware vSAN 8.0U3
• VMware ESXi 8.0U3
• NVMe Storage Devices

Cause

NVMe Status Code 0x6 (Internal Device Failure) indicates the physical NVMe controller's internal firmware aborted commands due to an unrecoverable hardware or controller execution fault. The software layer (ESXi) cannot write or read partition structures because the controller is not responding to I/O correctly.

/var/run/log/vmkernel.log 

Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu41:2098849)NvmeUtil: 93: Error status on Cmd(0x45d9413bf140) H:0x0 D:0x6 P:0x0 from component t10.NVMe____MT####################_________________254############## repeated 3200 times

Resolution

Hardware diagnostics and physical replacement are required.

1. Review /var/run/log/vmkernel.log for the following error pattern: Error status H:0x0 D:0x6 P:0x0 from device #### repeated #### times
2. Confirm if SMART statistics report warning thresholds for the affected drive.
3. Contact the OEM Hardware Vendor to perform hardware-level diagnostics.
4. If the hardware fault is confirmed, proceed with physical drive or controller replacement (RMA).
5. For offline drives, verify with the vendor the specific esxcli nvme device namespace format parameters (LBA format) supported by the firmware revision.

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