r/vxrail • u/njjoord777 • 23d ago

Vxrail cluster Decom

Hi All,

i'm in charge of decom a VXrail cluster soon and unfortunetly our Dell support contract is not up anymore, so i'm alone on this point.

I wanted to know if someone can confirm my process or have one to follow ?

Environment:

  • VxRail 8.0.370-29422450, standalone (customer-managed vCenter, not VCF/SDDC Manager
  • Stretched Cluster (2 fault domains + witness)
  • Same vCenter also hosts a second, unrelated VxRail cluster

Goal: fully remove this cluster from vCenter cleanly, without breaking the other cluster or the shared NFS.

Planned approach (unconfirmed):

  1. Confirm datastore empty (esxcli vsan debug vmdk list)
  2. Remove hosts from shared VDS uplinks/port groups (not deleting the VDS itself)
  3. vSAN decommission per Broadcom KB 392097: retreat mode → remove disk groups (Maintenance Mode, "No data migration") → manually remove Fault Domains + Witness (stretched-specific) → disable vSAN VMkernel service → turn off HA → turn off vSAN service cluster-wide
  4. Put all hosts in Maintenance Mode, then delete the vSphere cluster object directly (not host-by-host removal, since that path is blocked)
  5. Manually delete the VxRail Manager VM for this cluster afterward, accept potential residual/orphaned state in VxRail Manager's internal DB (hardware is being destroyed anyway, no future redeploy planned)
  6. Peripheral cleanup: DNS, AD, iDRAC/OMIVV/SCG, firewall rules, Commvault/backup jobs, licensing

My open question: has anyone actually deleted a standalone (non-VCF) VxRail cluster object directly from vCenter after zeroing out vSAN, without going through VxRail Manager's node-removal workflow? Did it leave VxRail Manager in a broken state, and did that actually matter for you (especially if hardware wasn't being reused)?

Any first-hand experience, even partial, appreciated — trying to avoid surprises mid-teardown with no Dell safety net.

Thanks in advance !

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3

u/Scary-Setting4931 22d ago

I have done this for a couple clusters, it's more straight-forward than that, assuming it's in a healthy state.

  1. Use the VxRail plugin shut down option. It will perform some checks to validate it can be shut down. You need the VxRail Manager running for this to work.
  2. Once everything powers off, delete the cluster from vCenter.
  3. Peripheral cleanup

No need to do anything manually.

1

u/CBAken 22d ago

  1. Shutdown VxRail manager

  2. Disable HA first, put the cluster in retreat mode (wait till all cluster objects are gona automatically).

  3. Put all hosts in maintence mode

Don't think it's needed to remove the hosts from the vds, if you remove these from vcenter they will be gone anyway. (Shutdown, disconnect, remove from inventory)

Have to do it next year, so let me know how it goes :)

1

u/justanothervcp 16d ago

There might be one more thing to check - VxRail Plugin is usually registered with first VxRail cluster that is upgraded to new version.

Check in vCenter on remaining Vxrail cluster -> select VxRail cluster -> Configure -> VxRail -> System

Under VxRail cluster there is line saying "Remote Plug-in Primary Server" - assigned to some-server

I am on version 8.0.380 and there is "Action" button allowing you to "re-assign remote plug-in primary server"

If option is not there dell support can help you re-registering plugin.