Symptoms

When a user attempts to put ESXi hosts into maintenance mode, the following error is reported: General vSAN error. Failed to enter or exit maintenance mode due to an internal vSAN error. Retry operation. With the ensure accessibility option selected, the host does begin to evacuate objects, and eventually fails with the above error.With the full data migration option, maintenance mode also fails.Following the steps in VMware KB https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=82619 did not help.

Cause

The DeltaComponent settings between ESXi hosts in the cluster were inconsistent.Running # esxcfg-advcfg -g /VSAN/DeltaComponent showed that the impacted hosts provided a result of Value of DeltaComponent is 0.Nonimpacted hosts provided a result of Value of DeltaComponent is 1.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, enable the DeltaComponent on the host to allow the maintenance mode operation to complete: On the ESXi host with issues, log in as root.Enable DeltaComponent as follows: # esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /VSAN/DeltaComponent Allow any resync operations to complete.Attempt to put the host in maintenance mode again.

Support Cases