VCF Host expansion task failed at "Validate vSAN disks for ESXi Host(s)"

Hello There,

This article briefs about an issue faced during expanding the cluster with vSAN ready node via SDDC Manager.

VCF: 4.5.0

ESXi : VMware ESXi 7.0.3 build-20328353

Thanks to my colleague Ahmed Alameri for his contribution.

We were recently working on cluster expansion via SDDC Manager and the task was failed at "Validate vSAN disks for ESXi Host(s)"

We had to quickly login to the ESXi host and check if the disks are healthy and are eligible to be used for vSAN.

We enabled SSH service on the host, and through CLI we validated if the disks were eligible for vSAN by running command 'vdq -q'

Output Sample:

[
   {
      "Name"     : "t10.NVMe_NVMe_Pxxxx_MU_U.2_1x.xTB________000xxxxxxxxx",
      "VSANUUID" : "",
      "State"    : "Eligible for use by VSAN",
      "Reason"   : "None",
      "IsSSD"    : "1",
"IsCapacityFlash": "0",
      "IsPDL"    : "0",
      "Size(MB)" : "1526185",
    "FormatType" : "512e",
   "IsVsanDirectDisk" : "0"
   },

We made sure the state of the disk and if "IsSSD" marked as "1"

The next step we validated the partitions of all the disks and found that 3 disks partition was unknown, we tried to clear the partition through GUI but it failed.

We ran the below command to list the disks:

[root@esxi:~] cd /vmfs/devices/disks

Identified the name of the disks and marked the disks as gpt using below command.

[root@esxi:/dev/disks] partedUtil mklabel Express_Flash_1.6TB_SFF gpt

Then we tried to clear the disk partition and it was successfully cleared and we tried to restart the task, however it still failed with below error message.

After checking on the physical host, we found one of the cache disk was having a minor difference of capacity and due to which the VCF task was failing, we had to replace the disk and match it with remaining cache disks and we tried to restart the task and the expansion was finished successfully.

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