In some cases, you might have to permanently remove a physical node / host from a Nutanix cluster.
There are two scenarios in node removal.
- Permanently Removing an online node
- Removing an offline / not-responsive node
in a 4-node cluster, at least 30% free space must be available to avoid filling any disk beyond 95%. You cannot remove nodes from a 3-node cluster because a minimum of three Zeus nodes are required.
Some Points to consider before initiating node removal:
- Sufficient Disk space available on other nodes in the cluster
- User Virtual Machine relocation (if required)
- Any software upgrade should not be running
- Checklist on verifying cluster health status
- Data resiliency is “OK” (green) in Prism
- Run a complete “ncc report” either from prism or CVM cli:
ncc health_checks run_all
Depending on the size of data, node removal can be lengthy process, which involves relocating data from the node to other healthy nodes in the cluster. Node removal also removes entries from the cluster configuration before permanently marking the node removed.
You can initiate Node Removal process from within Prism > Hardware > Select Host > Remove Host or from ncli.
Node removal process, when initiated, factors in cluster load and runs on a low priority - ensuring no impact to the cluster while relocating data to different nodes across the cluster.
To remove a node from a Nutanix Cluster, please follow the official Nutanix KB:
Removing Unreachable or Powered-off Nodes From Nutanix Clusters