How to safely evacuate the node from the vSAN cluster on VMware vSphere? VMware vSAN is one of the low-cost storage solutions for startups and mid-size companies. vSAN eliminates the need of Fibre channel networks. It aggregates the local disks and provides the storage over the network. This article will walk through how to remove the node from the vSAN cluster without affecting the data. We could also use the pre-check evaluation to validate our activity before actually removing a node from the vSAN cluster.
Environment: VMware vSphere 6.x
Datacenter: SEC (Secondary Datacenter of UA)
1. Login to the vCenter portal as an administrator. (Flash Based UI) .
2. Navigate to the Datastore and select the vSAN datastore and select the host like below. Click on the third icon (X) to trigger the pre-check evaluation.
3. Here is the first scenario if you have selected to evaluate the data to other vSAN nodes.
4. If you choose not to evacuate the data which resides on the host, you can see the inaccessible files and directories.
5. Place the host in maintenance mode.
6. Migrate the data to another vSAN host before moving the node into the maintenance mode.
7. Once the host is moved into maintenance mode, you can clean up the vSAN disk groups.
8. The following windows show nothing to migrate from the disk group.
9. Once the disk group is cleaned up, you can see the host like below.
10. Move the host from the cluster.
11. You could move it under datacenter.
12. Here we can see that ESXi host is completely out of cluster & vSAN.
We have successfully removed the ESXi host from vSAN & HA. Hope this article informative to you.