The other day, my colleague told me he had a misconfiguration in vSAN. He \u201cdisconnected\u201d and \u201cRemoved from inventory\u201d the witness. So, the symptom is clear, vCenter UI<\/strong> believes vSAN Cluster is not in Stretched Cluster mode, so all configuration through vCenter was impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Directly when he asked me to help him, I had multiple solutions in my head for repairing this error. But I was surprised to see that only one worked in my production case:<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information, the two situations didn\u2019t work in my production case but only in VMware HOL because :<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n For you, and before starting, you can find the normal VMware HOL vSAN configuration below: <\/p>\n\n\n\n All rest of this article is focused on my production case, so I won\u2019t explain in details why some cases (vCenter UI and PowerCLI) worked on my VMware HOL test, and why not it didn\u2019t in my production case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, first I thought PowerCLI would help me in this situation because it was only UI display bug..<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first test was to reconfigure vSAN Witness with the same host, obviously didn\u2019t worked because the cluster was considered as already configured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Syntaxt of this command is:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The second test is the same than the one above, and I had the same error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n N.B:<\/em><\/strong> Only worked in VMware HOL<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I tried as well to remove the Stretched Cluster to re-add the witness:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I put this command, I had the possibility to reconfigure the witness again in vCenter UI (CONFIGURE STRETCHED CLUSTER button worked), or directly with another PowerCLI command. In my production case, this command didn\u2019t change anything because I had the same displayed page than the first screenshot of this article. \u201cAlready in stretched cluster\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n vSAN has a lot of possibilities to configure witness, and the best option in my production case was the RVC Command <\/strong>because it was the only way I could solve the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, I tried to get the cluster information to know if the vSAN Witness was really configured or no. And without surprise, the cluster was correctly configured. After that, I had two possibilities: either remove the witness directly or replace it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The replace command is a little bit simpler because the only argument mandatory is the path of the cluster, whereas the remove command asked path of cluster, path of witness host, and name of preferred site. For removing the witness, the command is the following one, and when it was OK I had the possibility to configure again the witness through vCenter UI (production and VMware HOL case worked for me).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Code:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Below is the screenshot for replacing the witness host:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Code:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [VSAN] vSAN Witness incorrect information displayed in vCenter N.B: First of all, all screenshots and tests are provided in VMware HOL because I didn\u2019t think initially to write an article. The other day, my colleague told me he had a misconfiguration in vSAN. He \u201cdisconnected\u201d and \u201cRemoved from inventory\u201d the witness. So, the symptom is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,15,47],"tags":[23,21],"class_list":["post-2405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-7-0","category-vmware","category-vsan","tag-guide","tag-vmware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-screenshot-of-a-computer-description-automatica.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-screenshot-of-a-computer-description-automatica-1.png\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\nSet-VsanClusterConfiguration -Configuration (Get-VsanClusterConfiguration \u201cmgmt-cluster-01) -StretchedClusterEnabled $true -PreferredFaultDomain \u201cPreferred\u201d -WitnessHost \u201cesx-11.vcf.sddc.lab\u201d<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-screen-shot-of-a-computer-program-description-a.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-screen-shot-of-a-computer-program-description-a-1.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/word-image-2405-5.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-screenshot-of-a-computer-description-automatica-2.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Obviously, I tried the two options, and both worked as I will explain you below.<\/p>\n\n\n\nvsan.stretchedcluster.remove_witness pathofyourcluster<\/em><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-computer-screen-with-white-and-blue-text-descri.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-screenshot-of-a-computer-description-automatica-3.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nvsan.stretchedcluster.config_witness pathofyourcluster pathofyourwitnesshost nameofyourpreferedsite<\/em><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-computer-screen-with-white-text-description-aut.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/kdslabs.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/a-screenshot-of-a-computer-description-automatica-4.png\")
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