In a previous post I provided an example walk-through of the process for adding a new host to an existing VCF 4.1 on VxRail ‘VI Workload Domain (WLD)’:

https://davidring.ie/2020/12/16/vcf-4-1-on-vxrail-expand-a-cluster-add-node/

In this post I will provide an example walk-through of the process for removing a host from a VCF 4.1 on VxRail ‘VI Workload Domain (WLD)’. There are various reasons you may wish to perform this task but one that stands out is to re-use the host to bolster resources as needed in another ‘VI Workload Domain (WLD)’ cluster.

Note: Please ensure you have sufficient resource remaining after the removal of host to accommodate the existing workloads on the ‘VI Workload Domain (WLD)’ cluster from which the host is being removed (ensure vSAN has the required members to support protection policies). This is an example for reference only please use the VxRail installation procedures provided by Dell EMC.

In previous VCF On VxRail releases there were two key integrated procedures to follow, leveraging:

1. The SDDC Manager to remove the VxRail Host(s) in the VI WLD in VCF.
2. The VxRail Manager plugin in vCenter to remove the host from the VxRail Cluster.

Now as of the VCF 4.1 release we have introduced a single Remove Host workflow which is fully automated from SDDC Manager. The manual step of removing the host using VxRail Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter is no longer required and now executed via an API call to VxRail Manager as part of the SDDC workflow.

This example begins with a 4 node VCF on VxRail ‘VI Workload Domain’ and we reduce the host count by one host.

Logging into SDDC Manager we can see the existing 4 node cluster, this post will show the removal of host ‘vcfesxi08’ :

Remove A VxRail Host from VCF WLD

From the SDDC Manager dashboard navigate to Inventory->Workload Domains->View Details->VI WLD (viwld01)->Clusters->VI WLD (viwld):

From the Hosts tab select the host to be removed and click the Remove Selected Hosts button:

Confirm the removal of host from cluster:

From the Tasks pane we can view the list of steps the workflow is executing and track progress of the workflow. We see ‘Deletion of Transport Node config from host’:

We now see SDDC Manager fully automating the host removal process end-to-end via an API call to VxRail Manager:

Monitor log:

/var/log/vmware/vcf/operationsmanager/operationsmanager.log

From the Hosts tab we can now see that host vcfesxi08 has been successfully removed from the ‘VI WLD’ cluster: