Remove Disk Groups or Devices from vSAN

You can remove selected devices from the disk group or an entire disk group.

Because removing unprotected devices might be disruptive for the vSAN datastore and virtual machines in the datastore, avoid removing devices or disk groups.

Typically, you delete devices or disk groups from vSAN when you are upgrading a device or replacing a failed device, or when you must remove a cache device. Other vSphere storage features can use any flash-based device that you remove from the vSAN cluster.

Deleting a disk group permanently deletes the disk membership and the data stored on the devices.

Note: Removing one flash cache device or all capacity devices from a disk group removes the entire disk group.

Evacuating data from devices or disk groups might result in the temporary noncompliance of virtual machine storage policies.

Prerequisites

• You can either place the vSAN host in maintenance mode by selecting the Full data migration option or by selecting Ensure data accessibility when deleting a device or a disk group. If you select No data migration from the drop-down menu, your data might be at risk if a failure occurs during evacuation.

Procedure

1. Navigate to the vSAN cluster.
2. Click the Configure tab.
3. Under vSAN, click Disk Management.
4. Remove a disk group or selected devices.

   Option	Description
   Remove the Disk Group	Under Disk Groups, select the disk group to remove, and click …, then Remove. Select a data evacuation mode.
   Remove the Selected Device	Under Disk Groups, select the disk group that contains the device that you are removing. Under Disks, select the device to remove, and click the Remove Disk(s). Select a data evacuation mode.

   You can move the evacuated data to another disk or disk group on the same host.
5. Click Yes or Remove to confirm.
   The data is evacuated from the selected devices or a disk group and is no longer available to vSAN.