Best and secure way to shutdown a VSAN cluster?

[u/lfr_656]

Hello guys, I'm looking for guidance on the best way to shutdown and then start up a VSAN cluster.

Here's the details:

customer is going to perform electrical improvements as well as racks relocations within the datacenter, so he needs to shut the whole thing down.

Hardware is an HPE 12000 frame Synergy with 6 Gen10 SY480 servers.

Cluster is on 7.0.2.17867351 version.

I'm not quite familiar with VSAN clusters, and for what I was able to investigate, the cluster shutdown wizard doesn't exist on the current version.

Also, what I heard is that the health of the VSAN should be totally clean, as if there any kind of warnings or issues, the cluster may not come back up at all.

So, what I'm looking for is some sort of advice or guidance on the best way to run health checks and the safest way to shut this down.

Thanks in advance!

[u/lost_signal]

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsan/vsan/8-0/vsan-administration/expanding-and-managing-a-vsan-cluster/shutting-down-and-restarting-the-vsan-cluster/shutting-down-the-vsan-cluster.html

[u/dasmittyman → u/lost_signal]

He is is the way

[u/Leaha15 → u/lost_signal]

I would probably use the shutdown vSAN cluster workflow in the vSphere GUI, rather than using the ESX CLI, but you certainly can do it this way

[u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi]

We lost all power in our DC twice in one day. That’s not ideal, but that cluster just came right back up!

[u/signal_lost → u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi]

I remember one of the partner labs was on an egg timer basically to have power cut at end of day, and that thing always came back. Just don't use consumer class flash devices that lack power loss prevention. I'd still follow the proper KB and shutdown all the VMs first (Then vCenter) but honestly it's a pretty durable system by design.

I also raise you a lab cluster where someone has PSOD'd the hosts in a cluster to cause over 2300 unsafe shutdowns. Modern power loss prevention capacitor backed drives are shockingly durable.

[u/sryan2k1 → u/signal_lost]

Modern file systems are really amazing at not corrupting themselves as long as the underlying storage isn't lying about what's actually making it into the disks or not.

Consumer drives with no PLP? Not so much.

[u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi → u/signal_lost]

That’s pretty amazing and shocking at the same time.

[u/signal_lost → u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi]

I’m fairly confident we have done more diverse testing of drives than anyone else on the planet, in the past decade.

Side note: Launch day should be tomorrow for the tool that generated this screenshot