How to clear or delete old vSAN partitions on decommissioned hosts
For those of us that needs to build and tear down clusters all the time for demos or lab testing, turning vSAN Services on and off is a common occurrence. When you re-enable vSAN, you will notice that under the tab to “Claim Drives” you may or may not see any drives to be available.
This is because, when you Disable vSAN Services, it doesn’t remove/delete those previous vSAN partitions. So you must first clear all partitions to refresh those drives before it can be again re-used by vSAN.
In order to do, do the following steps.
Go to the particular host, under Configure > Storage > Storage Devices , there should be an option to “Erase Partitions”.
2. You can validate that the partitions are indeed previous vSAN partitions. Often, there would be the vSAN Metadata & vSAN File System partition. When ready, delete the said partitions.
3. However, there have been instances where it fails to delete the partition and spits an error similar to the one below.
4. If that happens, simply “Reboot the hosts”. And repeat steps 1 and 2.
That would work for most cases.
