Is It Possible to Remove Two Nodes From A Cluster?

Hi SinghK,

Are you looking to remove the nodes from the cluster permanently i.e. turn a four-nodes cluster into two-nodes one? Or is this for maintenance?

To give you a bit of an overview, the healthy minimum is 3 nodes. In a 3-nodes cluster, one node can be down (this is called fault tolerance). Once the node re-joins the cluster, the metadata is rebuilt, resilience is recovered and the system returns to a healthy state.

If you are looking to downsize the cluster to a two-nodes one then you would need to have the nodes re-imaged into a two-nodes configuration, deploy a Witness VM (not mandatory but is very strongly recommended). Two-nodes configuration is supported on a limited range of hardware and the environment must meet certain criteria. By no means a two-node cluster is recommended for general purpose however it has its use cases (ROBO implementations and other situations that require a lower cost yet high resiliency option).

Take a look at these:

Prism Web Console Guide: Two-Node Clusters
KB-5943 Single-Node and Two-Node Cluster FAQ