This one is a quick one, mostly because I feel like maybe I’ve just realized something that’s been obvious to the rest of the world.

I used to have vSAN set up in my lab environment and just found that it was a lot of hassle to run on (somewhat) outdated gear; I’m sure it’s fantastic on current equipment. I removed vSAN from my vSphere environment at least a year and a half, if not 2 years ago, and it was kind of a PITA. vSphere was consistently “reminding” me (errors all over the place) that I no longer had a vSAN volume, etc. It seems like I mostly got all of that resolved since that but today while moving some machines around (Storage vMotion) I still found myself getting the vSAN error in the title. I found a VMware KB article indicating that there’s no solution, just a workaround (here) and another blog article indicating that rebooting the vCenter appliance would fix it (here). I’m assuming that these articles are aimed at people who still have vSAN configured.

This is what it looks like for me when I attempted to Storage vMotion a VM. If I would proceed to try to move the VM, the vMotion would error out immediately with basically the same error.

I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me before, but I was able to resolve it by specifying a different VM storage policy; in this case the default for the destination datastore. Keep in mind, this VM was not on a vSAN datastore before moving it this time, though it had been on one way back when I still had vSAN configured.