I recently encountered the above error in VMware vLCM while working in a multi-site vCenter environment. The issue was initially identified by a site administrator who had full administrative rights over the datacenter object they managed.
The root cause of this issue lies in the site administrators restricted access. Although they had full permissions for their respective datacenter, they lacked global administrative privileges across the entire vCenter. For vLCM to function correctly, broader access rights are required.
After investigating the vCenter roles and permissions, I was able to identify the minimal privileges needed to resolve the issue without granting excessive access.
When a vSAN “cache” disk fails and gets replaced you need to rebuild the entire disk group that the cache disk belongs to. The normal way of doing this is to put the host in maintenance mode and then click the three dots next to the disk group and select “remove” (see picture below) – but unfortunately most of the time you get this error when trying to remove the disk group:
General vSAN error. vSAN disk data evacuation resource check has failed for disk or disk-group vsan: <UUID>
Luckily there is an easy way of removing the disk group from ESXi CLI that does seem to work every time (at least for me!). Enable SSH on the host containing the defective disk group. Locate the diskgroup UUID and run the following command (remember to replace <UUID>):
esxcli vsan storage remove --uuid <UUID>
If you are unable to find the UUID for the diskgroup then you can run this command:
esxcli vsan storage list
Which will give you an output like this:
Important! – if your host has more than one disk group find the correct one by searching for an belonging disk (naa.xxxxxxx – first red arrrow). When a disk in the group that you need to delete is found, note the “vSAN Disk Group UUID” (second arrow) – this will be the UUID you need to delete with “remove” command mentioned earlier!
If you are uncertain what is going on here – then call VMware support. Deleting the wrong diskgroup can have fatal consequences!
You are not very likely to bump into Windows 2003 physical servers anymore – but nevertheless that just happened to me a week ago. The task was clear – this server needs to be virtualized into a vSphere 7 environment, running vSAN. The problem with this task is that to convert (P2V) a 2003 server you need to install vCenter Converter 6.2 on it, since the latest release 6.3 simply doesn’t work on 2003 servers (It won’t install). Next problem is that vCenter Converter 6.2 doesn’t work with vSAN 7 – only “traditional storage” can be used as target – but in this case there were no other storage than vSAN that could be used as target. What to do? – read on…
If you run in to the above error when installing Windows 11 as a virtual machine on ESXi (or other virtual platforms) then be aware that there is a workaround.
A few days ago, I decided to update my vCenter server to version 6.7 U2c – normally this is an easy task with the update section in the VAMI interface. But this time I just encountered this error message when I tried to search for the update:
