I’ve been going through upgrades in the homelab and one of the changes has been to prepare for destructing an existing vSAN cluster and creating a new vSAN cluster. While going through vSAN ESA configuration, disks were not showing as available, I needed to go in and delete the existing partitions for the old vSAN cluster.
When in vSphere from a host and attempting to ‘Erase Partition’ from a storage device, we encounter the following error, below that is the error in Tasks.
SSH into the host and run the following command to verify disks are still part of a vSAN Disk Group
esxcli vsan storage list
In my case, I had all 3 disks appear, the following command removes the disks from the group. First you will need to obtain the VSAN Disk Group UUID
esxcli vsan storage remove -u <VSAN Disk Group UUID>
After running the command it will take you back to CLI prompt and you can confirm the disk group is empty by re-running the first command ‘esxcli vsan storage list’
Go back into the Storage Devices and retry the Erase Partition, I live dangerous so I did all 3 at once 🙂
It completed, validated in Tasks that partitions were updated succesfully.
Alright..dove right in and decided to get my management cluster upgraded to 8 after getting pre-requisites upgraded such as vROps, LogInsight, vRealize Lifecycle Manager & NSX.
My NVME drives in the hosts are not on the VMware vSAN HCL, but thankfully was able to ignore that in the Remediate settings options. I do have TPM 2.0 chips with Host Encryption enabled, so far no errors.
First step will be to take a snapshot of the vCenter, if you are running Enhanced Linked Mode, ensure you power all vCenters off and take cold-snapshots from the Host UI.
Because the upgrade deploys a new vCenter appliance, we will be renaming our existing VM object from ‘vCenter’ to ‘vCenter_old’
Accessing good old fashioned ui-installer wizard, will be selecting ‘Upgrade’
This will be a various of steps, for Step 1. It will be ‘Deploy a vCenter’, this step is to begin the deployment of a new VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance)
After accepting EULA, the next step will be to ‘Connector to Source Appliance’ this would be the hostname of the VM (not the VM object name in vCenter)
I will then put in the landing vCenter I want to deploy the new appliance too.
For Step 5 you will select a Folder location for the VM, followed by Step 6 which is select a Compute Resource.
Step 7 will ask for the name of the new VM appliance and desired root password
For Step 8 you will select the deployment size of the new appliance. These in every environment will vary and always plan for anticipated future growth.
The next step will be to deploy a datastore, I will personally be deploying and will select a storage location, I will select storage and will enable ‘Thin Provisioning”
The next step to select the portgroup assigned to the desired network and a temporary IP address for the VCSA because at the end of the upgrade, all the network settings remain the same for the new appliance.
This is the final configuration for this part of the upgrade, it will be followed by confirmation and then waiting for installation to complete.
Once the installation is completed, you should receive the following confirmation, from here you can prompt, notice that you do have a temporary VAMI interface to the new vCenter in the event you have to do any troubleshooting. The installer should continue.
The beginning of the wizard should only prompt one option and that is the 2nd step. Click Continue.
These are the warnings that appeared in my environment, these should allow me to proceed
The next step is to select what information do you want copied over, I personally want to choose both, my environment is smaller. Click Next.
For the final steps, it will be the option to join CEIP followed by confirming you performed backup and then kicking off process.
During the process you will lose connectivity to your vCenter, you can always look for one of the hosts the vCenter is residing in and monitor from console.
And just like that…we upgraded to 8 successfully.
For future blogs I will try and dive into vSphere 8 features more in depth.
