Hello Matt,
Welcome to Communities and vSAN.
"uh oh!! no pinging. wait. wait. wait."
So, firstly even if HA and vSAN are properly configured this is expected behaviour - HA is not capable of magically migrating a VM off a dead/isolated node and thus what it does is determine that this has happened and restart the VM on a remaining node (providing the data is sufficiently available), note that this is not instantaneous, for zero-downtime failover you would configure FT VMs or some form of in-VM clustering/redundancy/load-balancing.
"i can't click play. the vsandatastore is empty."
What this means is that the data (including the namespace Objects AKA VM folders) are inaccessible - this could be either due to them being provisioned as FTT=0 Objects which have no redundancy (and you just lost either the whole or part of the only copy) or there is some other issue with the cluster (e.g. remaining node was no longer clustered with the Witness).
"ive been into policies -> vm storage policies -> vsan default storage policy
looking in the storage compatibility, and mine doesnt appear there. not sure if it should or not??"
This means that the cluster in the current state is not capable of provisioning data with the Storage Policy (SP) rules chosen - e.g. if you only have 2-nodes available (e.g. 1 data-node + Witness) then you can't use an SP that requires a minimum of 3 nodes for component placement (e.g. the Default SP rules).
"if i tick force provisioning, on the previous advanced policy rules step, then it does show up."
Yes, but that's because Force Provisioning means it will make FTT=0 data if FTT=1 data creation is not possible - this means you don't have 3 nodes with available storage/clustered properly here.
"i cant even drag the VMGuest to the Node1 (through vCenter). it pops up with Move To: this action is not available...."
As I said above...how exactly would you expect vCenter to move/migrate a VM from a ESXi host it is not currently connected to? Secondly (if you had this configured correctly, which it looks like you don't) even if it was connected back to vC (but not vSAN) the VM would be dead/crashed as its Objects (e.g. vmdks) would be inaccessible from this host as they would have lost quorum.
What Storage Policy (SP) did you apply to your test VM? If none then assign an SP with the storage rules you want applied to your data (e.g. right-click VM, Edit Storage Policy, select an SP and apply).
So, step 1 here should be to put your cluster back together and validate that you can make FTT=1 FTM=RAID1 Objects - if you cannot then this is the problem from the start, this can easily be validated via:
Cluster > Monitor vSAN > Proactive tests > Proactive VM creation Test > Run
However, note that the above test uses the SP assigned as default to the vsanDatastore so if you have been messing with that (e.g. adding Force Provisioning = true) then undo these changes or make a new standard FTT=1,FTM=RAID1 SP.
If the above test fails it should tell you why e.g. need 3 Fault Domains (e.g. nodes) but found only 2 (e.g. if you didn't configure disks for the Witness or a node is isolated or has disks offline/unusable).
More information relating to the state of the cluster can be checked at:
Cluster > Monitor > vSAN > Health > retest
Bob
