Licensing is preventing to run the Cluster Destroy command | Nutanix Community
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As part of the cluster destroy or decommissioning process, we are supposed to unlicense the cluster first to release the licenses back to the Account Inventory. If you forgot to do it, now there is a guardrail which will not let you to destroy the cluster. You will get an error like below:

ERROR cluster:1360 We have detected that you are destroying a cluster that is in a licensed state. Please refer to https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/3716 to reclaim the licenses from this cluster before proceeding with 'cluster destroy'.

Sometime the cluster can be in a unstable or undefined state where the customer will not be able to access the Prism Gui to reclaim the licenses. In that case the solution provided by KB 3716 may not work.

The workaround for that can be:

  • SSH into the cluster
  • Start the cluster
  • Once the cluster comes back up, run the "ncli license reset-license" command
  • It will show whether the license was reset successfully
  • After that, stop the cluster again and try the "cluster destroy" command now

If the cluster cannot be started due to some other issues, then you will need open a support case and the SRE team can help to force destroy the cluster to bypass this check.

And the Last important step is to open a “non-technical” or “Licensing” case with the UUID of the destroyed cluster to reclaim the licenses manually.

 

The Nutanix cluster licensing is often the last thing thought of when cluster maintenance is happening but it can be a good practice to put the licenses back in the portal inventory until the cluster is in its final state when moving nodes around or doing major software updates.       In the case of the above post for cluster decommissioning and the associated article, it is a mandatory step.   KB3617        Definitely reach out to our licensing team if there are any questions.     🤓

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