How to remediate and skip releasing of IP address due to failure of VMKnic removal

Products

• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

• This article is required to allow users to understand what this warning means and how to remediate from it.
  
  
• Tasks such as Workload domain, cluster and host removal operations could throw a warning that says:
  "Due to the failure to remove VMknic [..] from ESXi Host [..], the following IP address [..] will not be released from the network pool to avoid possible IP conflicts."
  
  
• The below warning is thrown at the task "Remove vmknic(s) from ESXi Hosts"" with error code:
  "NOT_RELEASED_IP_ADDRESS_DUE_TO_FAILED_VMKNIC_REMOVAL."

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5
• VMware Cloud Foundation 5.x

Cause

During removal of the host operation, the workflow is trying to remove the hosts VMknics and then, it releases the associated IP addresses back to the free pool. However, when there is a failure during removal of VMknics operation and those VMknics are not removed successfully, the IP addresses are not released back to the free pool.

Resolution

To recover from this state, follow the below steps:

1. Remove the VMknics address that was not removed. This can be achieved with:

• CLI: using "esxcli network ip interface remove -i <vmknic name>" command.
  
  
• UI: login to ESXi UI and remove it from there.
  Documentation: Remove vmknic from ESXi

• Re-image of the host

Cleanup on the DB will be required with assistance from Broadcom Support, please open a support request for this.