Information regarding disabling DRS on a cluster that has vSphere with Tanzu Enabled

Products

• vSphere with Tanzu
• VMware vSphere with Tanzu

Issue/Introduction

VMware has removed the ability to disable DRS from the vSphere UI when the cluster has also vSphere with Tanzu/Workload Management enabled. By design disabling DRS will delete all resource pools in the cluster. vSphere with Tanzu had critical and unique information stored inside of these resource pools that, when deleted, will render the cluster in an unrecoverable state. As such we are requiring that vSphere with Tanzu/Workload Management be either disabled or in a removing state before you can turn off DRS on a cluster.

Resolution

FAQ

I need to prevent my VM's from vMotioning between hosts automatically, but I can't turn off DRS. How can I prevent my VM's from vMotioning automatically without turning off DRS?
-DRS has three modes, manual, partially-automatic and fully-automatic. vMotion is only automatically triggered when set to "Fully-Automatic." In order to prevent VM's from automatically vMotioning between hosts, edit DRS settings and change its mode to either Manual or Partially-Automated. More details can be found on our DRS Docs page .

I need to disable DRS because I have to downgrade my license and I need to disable all features that my new license does not have.
-One of the requirements for vSphere with Tanzu is that both DRS and vSphereHA are enabled on the cluster beforehand. As such in order to use vSphere with Tanzu, you will need be licensed for DRS and vSphereHA. In this situation, you would need to disable vSphere with Tanzu/Workload Management first.

I am working on a complex DRS issue and part of the troubleshooting VMware support asked me to do is to turn DRS off and back on.
-Let VMware support know that you currently are using vSphere with Tanzu/Workload Management and that is not a valid troubleshooting option for this cluster. 

My cluster is stuck configuring/removing vSphere with Tanzu and I want to disable DRS to try and unstick the removal process or some other edge case where you need to disable DRS and vSphere with Tanzu.
-VMware support would need to be engaged in order to disable DRS from the API and potentially clean up stale entries from the vCenter Database.