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I have a host I need to re-assign to other purposes. This host is part of an AOS cluster, running ESXi as a hypervisor. So basically, I need to remove the host from the ESXi cluster, then also gracefully remove it from the AOS cluster, so I can re-use the hardware elsewhere. Ive been reading this page:

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v7_3:wc-removing-node-pc-c.html

and it’s still unclear to me. It sems I have to first remove the host from the ESXi cluster (I can look up how to do that), but the instructions on how to then gracefully remove the node from the AOS cluster aren’t clear (to me). I’ve opened a ticket with Support, but while I wait for them, does anyone have any experience doing this? Or a page with step-by-step screenshots, perhaps? I’ve had to remove an ESXi host from a cluster once (long, long ago), but have never done so in an AOS cluster.

Thanks!

 

As an example, as this Reddit thread mentions “tell the host to enter MM, then on that hosts CVM, issue a "cvm_shutdown -p now" command. This has the CVM shut down nicely.”.

 

I can do that from VMware (put host into maint mode). And I can SSH to the CVM and tell it to shutdown. But does that remove the host from the cluster config? Or does the cluster just think that 1 host is offline for a while? This is what I am unclear about.

AH! This is why I asked. Support tells me the order of removal is AOS cluster *first*, *then* VMware.
“Yes you need to remove the node from AOS cluster first and then remove it from the Vsphere environment.”

Here are the specific steps they recommend (which are very different than that KB, which is one of the reasons why I asked).

To safely remove a node from a Nutanix AOS and VMware vSphere cluster:

  1. Do not place the ESXi host in maintenance mode before removing it from the Nutanix cluster, as this shuts down the Controller VM (CVM), causing removal failure.
  2. Ensure the CVM is powered on and communicating during Nutanix node removal.
  3. Recommended steps:
    • Migrate guest VMs manually in vCenter (without entering maintenance mode).
    • Remove the node from Nutanix via Prism UI or CLI (ncli host rm-start id=<host_id>).
    • Wait for data migration to complete.
    • Then place the ESXi host in maintenance mode.
    • Finally, remove the host from the VMware cluster

Mike,

I would follow the steps recommended via support; that is the method we have used to remove esxi nodes from nutanix clusters.

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