ESXi Host Decommision Question-Remove from Inventory or more involved?

[normalguy1234]

One of our locations is closing down that has only 2 hosts. Would like to remove hosts from vcenter in a graceful fashion prior to the location going dark. We are not re-purposing the equipment anywhere else.  If i 'Remove From Inventory' within vsphere, is there any additional cleanup from a vsphere perspective that needs to occur? Mainly concerned about datastores, distributed switches, etc. I have retired my fair share of hosts in the past in which you have to remove the host from distributed switch, detach from storage and the other processes that occur hence my question.

[daphnissov]

If you're not repurposing that hardware, will the removed hosts run VMs? Will the vCenter currently managing them continue to manage other hosts not being decommissioned? It's an "it depends" approach.

[jburen · Accepted solution]

There are indeed a couple of steps you need to take:

• Remove running VMs
• Disconnect remote storage
• Remove host from vDS
• Disconnect host from vCenter
• Remove host from vCenter
• Edit backup jobs
• Remove objects from DNS,AD,DHCP
• etc
• etc

[sc2317]

If you are not going to reuse the hardware then you can safely format the system. You may also refer Decommission an ESXi Host

I would suggest below steps.

1) Delete Virtual Machines

2) Delete Virtual Datastores

3) Remove host from vCenter

4) Format Internal disks/SD Cards if any including the drive/SD card that has ESXi installation.

5) Remove Network/Storage and Power Cables.