Unable to assign disk to my VSAN configure

[insearchof]

I have 4 Dell PowerEdge R430 Servers running ESXI 6.5

My VCSA is 6.7 in HA mode.

Each R430 has 4 internal drives   1 SSD and 3 Sata Drives all same size.

Originally they were all setup as Datastores.   So I erased each one.  

I can not erase the SSD drive.it has a folder on it named scratch where the log file is.

The error is Cannot change the host configuration

I know I need one SSD drive in the VSAN configuration .

So how can I get the drives

When I select the Cluster and go to the configure tab Under VSAN I select Disk Management

I see the 4 hosts and when I click on the claim unused  disks  no items selected.    Disks in use column has 0 of 3

In the bottom pane if I show NOT IN use (3)  I see the three drives     only options are turn on led   turn off led   or Mark as flash disk  none of which do anything   they are all type HDD so I can not make it a flash disk.  Need the SSD drive to be free.

Can I turn off the vm logging on the esxi host I think then I would be able to erase the partition on the SSD drive.

Any ideas or thoughts.

Thank you

Tom

[TheBobkin]

Hello Tom,

It doesn't show as available for claiming for vSAN use as it has partitions on it and you can't remove the partitions because /scratch is configured there.

Try re-directing this elsewhere, this usually takes a reboot to take effect:

VMware Knowledge Base

Bob

[insearchof]

Hello  TheBobkin

sounds like a plan.

Syslog.global.logDir         points to my SSD drive.

All other drives internal are not available 

Can I plug in a USB drive and mount it as a datastore?

Can I point the logdir on a NFS  datastore?

Thoughts

Thanks Tom

[TheBobkin]

Hello Tom,

Yes, you can redirect it to pretty much anywhere else - something durable like NFS datastore is probably a better idea than a USB stick.

You can always point it to a RAMdisk (e.g. non-persistent across reboots) if no datastore is available.

Bob

[insearchof]

TheBobkin,

Thank you for the info.

I was able to add a USB Datastore to my ESXI host.   can add folders and files no issues.

I went to this advanced setting          Syslog.global.logdir          [USB-Datastore] scratch/log 

A GENERAL SYSTEM ERROR OCCURED INTERNAL ERROR

I then tried my NFS storage       Syslog.global.logdir          [NFS06] scratch/log 

Same Error.

I was able to blank out the settings.   Maybe I can blank it out for now then add it to the VSANDatastore  

Seems I can not move this to another datastore.

Thoughts?

Tom

[Dave Morera]

This KB walks you through steps needed to configure syslog. Ideally you would want a centralize location for your logs as it makes it easier to troubleshoot. If you have vRealize Log Insight, you can connect vCenter to vRLI and it will go out and change this setting for your on your hosts.

VMware Knowledge Base