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Dreckly
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Splitting a VSAN

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere... I just can't see it...

ESXi6.0 + VSAN6.0

We have a system with a VSAN which we are trying to split into two clusters, with two independent VSANs. (Centrally managed by a single vCenter Server)

The VSAN is empty.

So, I've followed Vladan's page: https://www.vladan.fr/how-to-delete-vsan-datastore/ - disabled HA, set the VSAN to manually add disks to storage, removed the disk groups from the VSAN, disabled VSAN, etc.

The VSAN network for the two clusters was reconfigured to form two separate (isolated) networks - one for each cluster.

We then reassigned the hosts into a new cluster and re-enabled VSAN... manually assigned the disks and... the original VSAN datastore appears, and is connected to all hosts.

So, in my opinion, either the disks contain some metadata that they belong to VSAN "A" and I need to clean them, or there's some other magic at play here.

I guess my overall objective is: It seems I need to erase the original VSAN datastore, before destroying the VSAN...

Any guidance would be great as all the guides / discussions that I read only cover the creation of a single VSAN and then stop.

Thanks

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Dreckly
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Answering my own question...

I SSH'd in to the host and ran esxcli vsan cluster get

This showed the same Sub-Cluster UUID across both clusters - removing hosts from the cluster & re-adding didn't make any difference.

Eventually I used esxcli vsan cluster leave then disabled VSAN from the cluster, deleted the cluster and recreated the cluster again (with DRS / HA / VSAN all disabled).

Adding a single host to the cluster and re-enabling VSAN showed a new sub-cluster UUID... and a new VSAN datastore appeared.

Added all the remaining hosts and everything is (or appears to be) working .

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Dreckly
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Answering my own question...

I SSH'd in to the host and ran esxcli vsan cluster get

This showed the same Sub-Cluster UUID across both clusters - removing hosts from the cluster & re-adding didn't make any difference.

Eventually I used esxcli vsan cluster leave then disabled VSAN from the cluster, deleted the cluster and recreated the cluster again (with DRS / HA / VSAN all disabled).

Adding a single host to the cluster and re-enabling VSAN showed a new sub-cluster UUID... and a new VSAN datastore appeared.

Added all the remaining hosts and everything is (or appears to be) working .

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TheBobkin
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Hello Dreckly,

Glad you sorted this yourself, I intended to earlier but then RL called.

This all can be done from the command-line simply with 'esxcli vsan cluster leave' on two hosts then 'esxcli vsan cluster new' on one of them, and then just 'esxcli vsan cluster get' on the other standalone host to get the new vSAN Sub-cluster UUID so it can use 'esxcli vsan cluster join' to join it.

You *should* also reconfigure the cluster at the vCenter-level but the above would accomplish the vSAN-level clustering part.

Bob

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