How to properly retire 5 ESXi 6 hosts from a 10 node ESXi 6 cluster

[ad_astra_777]

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:

1. Remove the identified hosts from the ESX cluster
2. Remove the datastores. Work on one datastore at a time. Repeat for every LUN on the retired host:
   1. Once the host is removed from the cluster, unmount and detach the datastore from the host side using webclient
   2. Remove LUN masking from the array side.
   3. Rescan the hosts that are remaining in the cluster, to make sure they did not lose any LUNs
3. Remove host from vCenter
4. Identify the boot LUN
5. Shutdown the host
6. Unmask the boot LUN from the host
7. Unregister the server from the array
8. 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.

[RParker]

Yeah looks good.  Don't overcomplicate decommission.

REmoving hosts is easy adding them is tricky because you can break something, but removing them other than make sure old HBA and zones are removed from defunct servers is simple.