How to remove stale hosts from VCF inventory by enabling force to decommission

Products

• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

When users remove the dead hosts directly from vCenter instead of using VCF remove domain workflows, issues may arise later down the road when attempting to remove the host from VCF.

Resolution

Currently, no resolution is available.

Workaround
There is already support (from VCF 4.5 release) in domain workflows (remove host from cluster) to remove of the stale hosts, if its removed from
unstandardized procedures out of VCF workflows.

From VCF 5.0 release onwards in decommission workflow, there will be a flag (default disabled) which needs to be passed to decommission workflow API in-case the Domain-workflow (remove host from cluster) fails to remove the stale host.

Steps:
This is supported from only API.

1. Either SSH to sddc-manager or execute the API's from any rest client, provided the sample with curl command

2. Get the bearer auth token with following API,

Example:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"username": "<<SDDC SSO username>>","password": "<<SDDC SSO password>>"}' http://localhost/v1/tokens | json_pp

3. Copy the bearer token and provide same in bearer token section in the following decommission API by enabling force flag to remove only the stale hosts which are not required to be part of any workload domain, provide FQDNS of only dead hosts or stale hosts

Example:

curl -k 'https://sddc-manager.vrack.vsphere.local/v1/hosts?force=true' -i -X DELETE \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9....' \
    -d '[{
            "fqdn" : "esxi-4.vrack.vsphere.local"
         },
         {
           "fqdn" : "esxi-5.vrack.vsphere.local"
         }
       ]'

Note: Please be cautious while providing the FQDN, provide only those FQDN's(stale hosts FQDN's) which are actually to be removed from VCF inventory, force flag will not do any check whether the host is part of any cluster or not, it will just cleanup inventory and host related configurations in SDDC-Manger.