Enabling or disabling a vSAN cluster

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to enable or disable vSAN.

For documentation of the procedure and considerations in later releases, refer to the VMware docs guides:

1. vSAN 6.5/6.6: Enabling vSAN
2. vSAN 6.7: Enabling vSAN
3. vSAN 7.0: Enabling vSAN
4. vSAN 8.0: Enabling vSAN

For more information, see the vSphere documentation. The documentation contains definitive information. If there is a discrepancy between the documentation and this article, assume that the documentation is correct.

Environment

VMware vSAN 8.0.x
VMware vSAN 6.0.x
VMware vSAN 7.0.x
VMware vSAN 6.1.x
VMware vSAN 6.2.x
VMware vSAN 6.x

Resolution

Prerequisites

• Verify that your environment meets all hardware requirements. All hardware must be on the VMware HCL. Also all disks and HBA controller must be on the VMware vSAN-specific HCL.
• Ensure that you have vSAN networking configured. For more information, see Configuring vSAN VMkernel Networking (2058368).
• For best performance, the environment should be designed for the specific workload intended to be run on the cluster.

Enabling vSAN

Enabling vSAN creates a vSAN datastore and registers the vSAN storage provider. The vSAN storage provider communicates the storage capabilities of the datastore to vCenter Server. Currently, there are no third-party storage providers.

To enable vSAN on an existing cluster:

1. Open the vSphere Web Client.
2. Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
3. Select the cluster on which you want to enable vSAN.
4. Click the Configure tab.
5. Under vSAN, select Services, click Turn on vSAN, and then follow the wizard.
6. Click OK.

Disabling vSAN

Warning: When you disable the vSAN cluster, all virtual machines located on the shared vSAN datastore become inaccessible. If you intend to use a virtual machine while vSAN is disabled, make sure you migrate virtual machines from vSAN datastore to another datastore before disabling the vSAN cluster. 

Note for stretched clusters (including 2-node), please disable the stretch and remove the witness per our documentation prior to the steps below.

To disable vSAN on the cluster:

1. Open the vSphere Web Client.
2. Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
3. Select the cluster on which you want to disable vSAN.
4. Click the Configure tab.
5. Under vSAN, select Services and click Turn off vSAN. If the option is greyed out, disable vSphere HA which lists as vSphere availability under configure tab.
6. Click OK.

Additional Information

How to configure vSAN VMkernel networking