Before you shut down, reboot, or disconnect a host that is a member of a vSAN cluster, you must put the host in maintenance mode.

When working with maintenance mode, consider the following guidelines:
  • When you place an ESXi host in maintenance mode, you must select a data evacuation mode, such as Ensure accessibility or Full data migration.
  • When any member host of a vSAN cluster enters maintenance mode, the cluster capacity automatically reduces as the member host no longer contributes storage to the cluster.
  • A virtual machine's compute resources might not reside on the host that is being placed in maintenance mode, and the storage resources for virtual machines might be located anywhere in the cluster.
  • The Ensure accessibility mode is faster than the Full data migration mode because the Ensure accessibility migrates only the components from the hosts that are essential for running the virtual machines. When in this mode, if you encounter a failure, the availability of your virtual machine is affected. Selecting the Ensure accessibility mode does not reprotect your data during failure and you might experience unexpected data loss.
  • When you select the Full data migration mode, your data is automatically reprotected against a failure, if the resources are available and the Failures to tolerate set to 1 or more. When in this mode, all components from the host are migrated and, depending on the amount of data you have on the host, the migration might take longer. With Full data migration mode, your virtual machines can tolerate failures, even during planned maintenance.
  • When working with a three-host cluster, you cannot place a server in maintenance mode with Full data migration. Consider designing a cluster with four or more hosts for maximum availability.
Before you place a host in maintenance mode, you must verify the following:
  • If you are using Full data migration mode, verify that the cluster has enough hosts and capacity available to meet the Failures to tolerate policy requirements.
  • Verify that enough flash capacity exists on the remaining hosts to handle any flash read cache reservations. To analyze the current capacity use per host, and whether a single host failure might cause the cluster to run out of space and impact the cluster capacity, cache reservation, and cluster components, run the following RVC command: vsan.whatif_host_failures. For information about the RVC commands, see the RVC Command Reference Guide.
  • Verify that you have enough capacity devices in the remaining hosts to handle stripe width policy requirements, if selected.
  • Make sure that you have enough free capacity on the remaining hosts to handle the amount of data that must be migrated from the host entering maintenance mode.
Maintenace mode dialog
The Confirm Maintenance Mode dialog box provides information to guide your maintenance activities. You can view the impact of each data evacuation option.
  • Whether or not sufficient capacity is available to perform the operation.
  • How much data will be moved.
  • How many objects will become non-compliant.
  • How many objects will become inaccessible.