Investigating network partitions (without vSphere Web Client)

Once you have VSAN configured and enabled, you may find that the hosts are not communicating with each other properly. As VSAN is a distributed storage system, it depends on healthy, functional networking to work properly. If you have a cluster where not all nodes can communicate via both unicast and multicast IP, then one or more nodes will be in a different network partition from that of the other node(s). To work as expected, all VSAN nodes must be in the same network partition.

If the VSAN cluster is partitioned and vCenter itself runs on VSAN-provisioned storage, you may not be able to investigate the problem by using vSphere Web Client. If this occurs, you should validate the network configurations via SSH or the physical console CLI. While choosing to run vCenter on VSAN-provisioned storage is a fully supported configuration and will not cause long-term production issues, it could make troubleshooting more complex in the...