Setting up Enhanced Linked Mode is easy and almost mandatory for bigger environments; but what about when things go wrong? Dead vCenter instances in your inventory is, if nothing else, unsightly. Here’s how you can tidy up.
My example assumes Enhanced Link Mode is being used with an embedded vCSA in 6.5 or above, but the process is similar when removing external Platform Service Controllers.
Starting off, my example inventory looks like this.
I’m going to remove the 172.16.61.3 node.
SSH to a vCenter instance that will be staying in the environment. You can enable SSH from the VMware Appliance Management Interface on port 5480
Launch a bash shell
shell
List all known nodes
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/dir-cli nodes list
If you need to specify a different target node or username other than [email protected] the syntax looks like this
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/dir-cli nodes list --login [email protected] --server-name 172.16.65.100
The –password parameter can also be set. If unset, you’ll simply be prompted to enter the password.
Power off the node to be removed or disconnect vNICs to prevent it from talking to other nodes.
It’s worth noting that this is a one way trip. The same node cannot be re-added once removed.
Remove the node from inventory
cmsso-util unregister --node-pnid 172.16.61.3 --username [email protected]
–node-pnid can be the FQDN or IP address of a node.
All services including the web client service will be restarted. We can then verify the required node has been removed
/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/dir-cli nodes list
