Recently while working on a restructuring our infrastructure, we decided to remove few ESXi host out of the vSAN Cluster. In a normal environment it's pretty easy to take any host out of the existing cluster. However when it comes to vSAN we need to take multiple factors into consideration before we take the host out of cluster.
In this article we will discuss the correct procedure to remove ESXi host from a vSAN cluster.
1. First ensure that you have enough capacity available in disk group to accommodate the cluster load before taking any existing host out of the cluster.
2. Right Click on the host and select Maintenance > Enter Maintenance Mode.
3. In the next step, make sure that 'Move powered off and suspended virtual machines to other hosts in the cluster' option is checked. Also select 'Evacuate all data to other host' and click OK. This will evacuate all the disk groups on that ESXi host.
4. Soon after you click on OK, resync task will start. You can check the resync status by selecting a vSAN Cluster > Monitor > vSAN > Resyncing Components.
5. Wait for the resync to finish and the host to enter the maintenance mode. When resync is complete, you would see Resyncing Components and Bytes left to resync equals to 0.
6. Now that the resync is complete and the host has entered into the Maintenance Mode you can safely delete the Disk Group(s) on the ESXi host which you would like to take out of the cluster. To delete the disk group, navigate to a vSAN Cluster > Configure > Disk Management. Select the appropriate Disk Group and Click on Remove the Disk Group.
7. In the next step you can select any of the below option, as we have already evacuate all the data from the host in Step 3.
8. Click on Yes and the disk group will be removed successfully.
9. You can now move the ESXi host out of the cluster to disassociate it from the vSAN by dragging it outside the cluster.
You can later power off the ESXi host to save some power if it's not going to be re-used anywhere.
I hope you will find this post useful.
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