When you work with nested vSAN homelab installations that constantly suffer power loses and network issues you get to know tons of useful troubleshooting tricks ;-). vSAN data seems to survive all of these unexpected failures, it is just a cluster services that sometimes need a little help. But remember, feel free to explore new tricks in your homelab but always consult Technical Support when you are not sure about the results of the command you want to use in your production environment.
Recently I ran into an issue in my lab and I wanted to see if it is vSAN related. There is this option in ESXi to boot a host with selected modules disabled. When the host boots, you have to press Shift+O to be able to disable modules.
Here is how I disabled vsan module:
jumpstart.disable=vsan,lsom,plog,virsto,cmmds
And how to verify if the module is loaded:
esxcli system module list
vCenter recognized that the host in the cluster does not have its vSAN service enabled.
How to make a host to load back the vSAN module? Simply by restarting it. Although this host did not have a vSAN module at that moment, it was still in my vSAN cluster. The nice thing is that I got an additional notification from the vCenter that I had a partition in my cluster before the restart. Good to know…?
