A while ago my lab got itself into a properly broken state, and the quickest way out was to reinstall ESX on all the hosts and start fresh. So I did exactly that – wiped the OS, reinstalled ESX 9.1, and went straight into preparing the hosts for a new VMware Cloud Foundation deployment. And that’s where I ran into a wall: the fresh install refused to play nicely with the old vSAN disks. Errors like “vSAN partition found”, “found zero SSD devices for SSD cache tier” and disks stuck at “Ineligible for use by VSAN” kept showing up.
In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate how to quickly remove old vSAN data from an ESX host.