When working with a vSAN cluster, you may need to replace a failed disk and find yourself in a situation where removing it from the GUI is not possible. In my case, the error I was getting in vCenter was: Unable to removed “Absent VSAN disk”.
To fix this problem, you can force the removal of the disk via SSH by running the following commands (on the host that reports the broken disk):
esxcli vsan storage list
This should return output similar to the following:
[root@esxi:~] esxcli vsan storage list
naa.50014ee2b3159279
Device: naa.50014ee2b3159279
Display Name: naa.50014ee2b3159279
Is SSD: false
VSAN UUID: 524e53f1-5c58-65a1-b74b-45eef4ef12c5
VSAN Disk Group UUID: 52770f3a-cbfe-4572-e584-191164fe643a
VSAN Disk Group Name: naa.55cd2e404b55498e
Used by this host: true
In CMMDS: true
On-disk format version: 10
Deduplication: false
Compression: false
Checksum: 4308889842710721654
Checksum OK: true
Is Capacity Tier: true
Encryption Metadata Checksum OK: true
Encryption: false
DiskKeyLoaded: false
Is Mounted: true
Creation Time: Fri Sep 18 10:25:54 2020Unknown
Device: Unknown
Display Name: Unknown
Is SSD: false
VSAN UUID: 5263d9d3-9ed7-76d0-d9b0-7d11a8a5e645
VSAN Disk Group UUID:
VSAN Disk Group Name:
Used by this host: false
In CMMDS: false
On-disk format version: -1
Deduplication: false
Compression: false
Checksum:
Checksum OK: false
Is Capacity Tier: false
Encryption Metadata Checksum OK: true
Encryption: false
DiskKeyLoaded: false
Is Mounted: false
Creation Time: Unknown
Then remove the disk, taking its UUID from the output of the previous command:
esxcli vsan storage remove -u 5263d9d3-9ed7-76d0-d9b0-7d11a8a5e645
This command doesn’t return any output, but you can then run the “esxcli vsan storage list” command again to check that the old disk has been removed successfully.