vSAN host stuck on Initializing SSD

[milesthomp]

Hello,

I have a vSAN 6.6 cluster and after removing a disk from the hosts' disk group, shutdown the server and removed it.

After removing the disk, the server was restarted to make sure everything was ok after physical disk removal.

Everything looked good so I shutdown the server again and installed a new disk, creating a new RAID0 logical drive for the disk. But now ESXi gets stuck Initializing SSD.

If I switch to to the CLI screen, this is what is there:

Anyone have any ideas? It's been stuck here for 30min or more.

[milesthomp · Accepted solution]

I left the server over night and found that it had completed startup in the morning, phew!

I could then see I'd removed the wrong disk from the disk group and one was reported as missing. This is probably why it took forever to start.

[nrsc0202]

I ran into this same exact problem when upgrading my ESXi hosts from 6.0 update 3 to 6.5 update 1. It took anywhere from 30-60 minutes to get past this screen. Hopefully this is not a bug in 6.5 update 1.

[carvaled]

We had it last 7h on a host once!

Recently I killed 2 hosts (hard powerdown) in a 6 node vSan cluster with FTT=2, Raid 5 and EC policy... left the hosts down for 1 1/2h and the 2nd for 1h... Not much IO on the VM's so the storage changes were minimal... the 2nd host booted up within about 20min the 1st host took 2 1/2 hours to come back!