Hi All,
I was looking for help on how to achieve the following: properly retire 5 ESXi 6 hosts from a 10 node ESXi 6 cluster.
I have a 10 node production ESXi 6 cluster. I need to retire (decommission) 5 hosts from it. The cluster has shared storage - EMC Unity - 30 LUNs. The storage is connected via FC. All hosts are boot from SAN. I need to make sure I can safely remove 5 hosts, in particular, disconnect them from the storage so that the other hosts do not lose connectivity to any of the LUNs. I looked around, thought it over, and came up with the following plan:
- Remove the identified hosts from the ESX cluster
- Remove the datastores. Work on one datastore at a time. Repeat for every LUN on the retired host:
- Once the host is removed from the cluster, unmount and detach the datastore from the host side using webclient
- Remove LUN masking from the array side.
- Rescan the hosts that are remaining in the cluster, to make sure they did not lose any LUNs
- Remove host from vCenter
- Identify the boot LUN
- Shutdown the host
- Unmask the boot LUN from the host
- Unregister the server from the array
- Remove to array zoning.
Can you please let me know if this make any sense? If there is a better way to address this please share.
Appreciate your input.