VMware vSAN Daemon Liveness - EPD Status Abnormal

I reinstalled ESXi and vSAN ESA 8.0 on hosts that were previously running ESX and vSAN ESA 9.0. It's a lab environment. I did not bother to delete the previous VMFS volume on a local drive in each host. This is where ESXi was storing scratch data, logs, etc. After reinstalling 8.0 and turning on vSAN, I noticed the following error in vSAN Skyline Health: vSAN daemon liveness.

I expanded the health check to get more information. There I could see Overall Health, CLOMD Status, EPD Status, etc. EPD Status showed Abnormal on all of the hosts. I naturally did some searching online and came up with some clues including the knowledge base (KB) articles below.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=318410

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=326596

They were helpful, but did not get me to resolution. The post below from a few years ago got me closer.

https://community.broadcom.com/vmware-cloud-foundation/discussion/vsan-epd-status-abnormal

I browsed the existing VMFS volume and noticed the  epd-storeV2.db file in the .locker folder.

Since it is a lab environment, I figured why not just delete the file and see if vSAN heals itself (recreates the necessary files). I put the host in maintenance mode as a precaution, deleted the file, and rebooted the host. This resolved the issue. In addition to the .db file, I noticed the addition of a new file,  epd-storeV2.db-journal.

I checked vSAN Skyline Health and the error was gone for that host. You can see the status of each host if you click the Troubleshoot button for the vSAN daemon liveness health check. I repeated that effort for each host in the cluster.

The vSAN Skyline Health error was gone after completing the process on all of the hosts in the cluster.

I probably could've restarted services on the hosts as detailed in the KB article above, but I chose to reboot them since they were already in maintenance mode.

VMware VCF Installer Warning - Evacuate Offline VMs Upgrade Policy

I ran across this warning in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Installer when deploying VCF 9:

cluster <cluster name>: Evacuate Offline VMs upgrade policy configured for cluster <cluster name> on vCenter does not match default SDDC Manager ESXi upgrade policy. It has value false in vCenter, and default value true in SDDC Manager.

The fix is simple...

In the vSphere Client, click the three horizontal lines in the top left corner.

Click Lifecycle Manager.

Click Settings.

Click Images.

Click the Edit button for Images on the right side of the window.

Click the checkbox next to "Migrate powered off and suspended VMs to other hosts in the cluster, if a host must enter maintenance mode" to check the box.

Click Save.

Re-run the VCF Installer validations.