If you detect a failed storage device or if you upgrade a device, you can manually remove it from a host by using an ESXCLI command.

If you remove a flash caching device, vSAN deletes the disk group that is associated with the flash device and all its member devices.

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.

Procedure

  1. Open an SSH connection to the ESXi host.
  2. To identify the device ID of the failed device, run this command and learn the device ID from the output. 
    esxcli vsan storage list
  3. To remove the device from vSAN, run this command. 
    esxcli vsan storage remove -d device_id

    The following are the commands available for managing vSAN ESA cluster:

    Table 1. vSAN ESA Commands
    Command Description
    esxcli vsan storagepool add Add physical disk for vSAN usage.
    esxcli vsan storagepool list List vSAN storage pool configuration.
    esxcli vsan storagepool mount Mount vSAN disk from storage pool.
    esxcli vsan storagepool rebuild Rebuild vSAN storage pool disks.
    esxcli vsan storagepool remove Remove physical disk from storage pool. Requires one --disk or --uuid param.
    esxcli vsan storagepool unmount Unmount vSAN disk from storage pool.

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.