How to Silence vSAN Health Checks in a Nested Homelab so VMware Update Manager can be used

I’m running a fully nested homelab with a four-node vSAN Cluster. When trying to patch my vSphere environment using VMware Update Manager (VUM), my remediation pre-check fails because the vSAN Health Services are reporting an error. This short blogpost explains how to silence a vSAN Health Check:

Since the ESXi servers are nested VMs, the VMware Paravirtualized SCSI controller is obviously not on the VMware Compatibility List (HCL) for vSAN.

To silence this specific health check take the following steps:

Access the Ruby Console

Open a remote console or SSH session to the vCenter Server Appliance and access the Ruby Console:

rvc administrator@vsphere.local@172.16.11.62

You can access your vCenter objects just like file folders. By using ls and cd commands, you can navigate all the way down to your vSAN Cluster:

Disable the Health Check

Get the Health Check Status using the command:

vsan.health.silent_health_check_status /172.16.11.62/dc01/computers/cluster01

This gives you a long list of all Health Checks performed for your vSAN Cluster:

We’re specifically interested in

"SCSI controller is VMware certified | controlleronhcl | Normal |

We want to silence the vSAN Health Check by typing

 vsan.health.silent_health_check_configure /172.16.11.62/dc01/computers/cluster01 -a 'controlleronhcl'

This adds the health check to the silent list.

Verify in the vSphere H5 client

If we now go back to the vSAN Health Check page in the vSphere UI, we can see that the health check and alarm will disappear after doing a re-test.

Remediate the cluster using VMware Update Manager

We can now go ahead using VUM agains the nested vSAN cluster with non-HCL hardware and remediate the hosts: