Safely detach a storage device from your ESXi host.

You might need to detach the device to make it inaccessible to your host, when, for example, you perform a hardware upgrade on the storage side.

Prerequisites

  • The device does not contain any datastores.
  • No virtual machines use the device as an RDM disk.
  • The device does not contain a diagnostic partition or a scratch partition.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, navigate to the ESXi host.
  2. Click the Configure tab.
  3. Under Storage, click Storage Devices.
  4. Select the device to detach and click the Detach icon.

Results

The device becomes inaccessible. The operational state of the device changes to Unmounted.

What to do next

If multiple hosts share the device, detach the device from each host.