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

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

Typically, you delete devices or disk groups from Virtual SAN 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 Virtual SAN cluster.

Deleting a disk group permanently deletes the disk membership as well as 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 Virtual SAN host in maintenance mode by selecting the Full data migration option or by selecting Ensure 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.
  • You can remove devices or disk groups only when the Virtual SAN cluster is set up in manual mode. For the automatic device claim mode, the remove action is not supported.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the Virtual SAN cluster in the vSphere Web Client.
  2. Click the Configure tab.
  3. Under Virtual SAN, click Disk Management.
  4. Remove a disk group or selected devices.
    Option Description
    Remove the Disk Group
    1. Under Disk Groups, select the disk group to remove, and click the Remove the disk group icon ().
    2. Select a data evacuation mode.
    Note: The Remove the disk group icon does not appear when the Virtual SAN cluster is set up in automatic mode. The icon appears only when the cluster is in manual mode.
    Remove the Selected Device
    1. Under Disk Groups, select the disk group that contains the device that you are removing.
    2. Under Disks, select the device to remove, and click the Remove the selected disk(s) from the disk group icon ().
    3. Select a data evacuation mode.
    You can move the evacuated data to another disk or disk group on the same host.
  5. Click Yes to confirm.
    The data is evacuated from the selected devices or a disk group and is no longer available to Virtual SAN.