When necessary, you can shut down the entire Virtual SAN cluster.

If you plan to shut down the Virtual SAN cluster, you do not need to manually disable Virtual SAN on the cluster.

Procedure

  1. Power off all virtual machines (VMs) running in the Virtual SAN cluster.
  2. Place the ESXi hosts in maintenance mode.
    1. Right-click the host and select Enter Maintenance Mode.
    2. Select the No data migration evacuation mode and click OK.
  3. In the Confirm Maintenance Mode wizard, deselect the Move powered-off and suspended virtual machines to other hosts in the cluster check box.
    When you deselect this check box, Virtual SAN does not migrate the VMs to other hosts. If you plan to shut down the entire cluster and put all hosts in maintenance mode, you do not need to move or migrate the VM storage objects to other hosts or devices in the cluster.
  4. Power off the hosts after they have successfully entered maintenance mode.
  5. Power on the ESXi hosts.
    1. On the physical box where ESXi is installed, press the power button until the power-on sequence begins.
      The ESXi host starts, locates its VMs, and functions normally.

    After you power on the hosts, the Virtual SAN cluster is automatically recreated.

    If you navigate to the ESXi host and click Summary, you might see that the Network Status of the cluster appears as Misconfiguration detected.
    You can ignore the status message if you did not make network configuration changes and the Virtual SAN cluster was working as expected before you shut down the cluster. The message disappears after at least three hosts join the cluster.
  6. Take the hosts out of maintenance mode.
  7. Restart the VMs.