Trouble removing ESXi 5.0 hosts from cluster

[techsuresh]

Dear All,

Good Day,

We have a cluster with three ESXi 5.0 hosts in production environment. The vCenter Server is running in a physical machine. Now we are facing some hardware issues with the physical machine where the vCenter server is running. Mean while we have a fresh installation of vCenter server in a new physical machine. we want to remove those three ESXi hosts from the old vCenter Server machine and needs to be added in the newly installed vCenter server machine. Since those three ESXi hosts in a cluster, we need to put those hosts in to maintanance mode to remove the hosts from the cluster and then we need to remove the hosts from vCenter. But if we put two hosts among three hosts in to maintanance mode, the 3rd host has over loaded with virtual machines. That is the reason, we are not able to remove the hosts from that cluster. We are in trouble as we do not have down time for the virtual machines.

Please lemme know if any one have better solution to remove the hosts from old vCenter and add the hosts to new vCenter without having down time to the Virtual Machines.

thanks in advance

Suresh

[Andyjag]

Hi Suresh,

Have a look at this article which may help your predicament...

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/moving-an-esxi-host-to-a-new-vcenter-server/4178

Hope this helps you.

Thanks,

Andy

[Sreejesh_D · Accepted solution]

its not required to put the host into maintenance mode to add it into a different vCeneter Server. We can achieve by the following steps.

1. disable HA and DRS in existing cluster.

2. Disconnect and remove the host from vCenter.

3. Add the hosts into the cluster created in new vCenter.

this way the hosts will not be overloaded.