You should replace a flash capacity device or a magnetic disk if you detect a failure or when you upgrade it. Before you physically remove the device from the host, you must manually delete the device from vSAN.

When you unplug a capacity device without removing it from the vSAN cluster, the components on the disk are marked as absent. If the capacity device fails, the components on the disk are marked as degraded. When the number of failures of the object replica with the affected components exceeds the FTT value, the virtual machines on the disk become inaccessible. See Capacity Device Not Accessible in a vSAN Cluster.

Note: If your vSAN cluster uses deduplication and compression, you must remove the entire disk group from the cluster before you replace the device.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that the storage controllers on the hosts are configured in passthrough mode and support the hot-plug feature.

    If the storage controllers are configured in RAID 0 mode, see the vendor documentation for information about adding and removing devices.

  • If you upgrade the capacity device, verify the following requirements:
    • Verify that the cluster contains enough space to migrate the data from the capacity device.
    • Place the host in maintenance mode.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the vSAN cluster.
  2. On the Configure tab, click Disk Management under vSAN.
  3. Select the disk group that contains the device that you want to replace.
  4. Select the flash capacity device or magnetic disk, and click Remove selected disk(s) from disk group.

What to do next

  1. Add a new device to the host.

    The host automatically detects the device.

  2. If the host is unable to detect the device, perform a device rescan.