Complete Removal of Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed (TMC-SM) from vSphere and VCF Environments

Products

• VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service

Issue/Introduction

This article outlines the correct, top-down sequence to cleanly remove all TMC-SM components across the architecture: starting with the managed guest clusters, moving to the registered Supervisor cluster, and finally removing the central TMC-SM control plane.

Cause

Administrators may need to completely uninstall and remove the TMC-SM footprint from their environments.

Resolution

To ensure a clean uninstallation without causing Kubernetes garbage collection deadlocks, the teardown must follow this specific order:

Phase 1: Remove Agents from Managed Guest Clusters

Before touching the management layer, you must remove the TMC agents from all downstream workload clusters.

If your TMC-SM control plane is functioning normally and you intend to keep the workload clusters in your environment:

1. Follow the official procedure to safely unmanage the cluster:
   • Documentation: Remove a workload cluster from management
2. Repeat this process for every guest cluster currently managed by TMC-SM.

Note: If your TMC-SM control plane is non-functional, if a cluster is stuck attempting to unmanage, or if you intend to permanently delete the workload clusters rather than keep them, do not proceed. Please contact Broadcom Support for assistance.

Phase 2: De-register the Supervisor Cluster.

Once all guest clusters are unmanaged and clean, sever the connection between the vSphere Supervisor and TMC-SM.

1. WARNING: Do not manually delete the svc-tmc-#### namespace at any point. It's installed by default during the Supervisor deployment and must remain even after de-registering the Supervisor from TMC SM.
2. Set your kubectl context to the registered Supervisor cluster.
3. Execute the declarative de-registration commands to cleanly remove the management-level TMC agents:
   • Documentation: Manually remove the cluster agent from a Supervisor

Phase 3: Uninstall the TMC-SM Control Plane

After all downstream agents and Supervisor registrations have been cleared, you can safely tear down the central TMC-SM hosting environment.

You have two options depending on your cluster utilization:

• Option A (Uninstallation)
  • If the guest cluster hosting the TMC-SM control plane runs other workloads, cleanly sweep the tmc-local namespace and CRDs using the TMC-SM CLI or Installer UI. 
    • CLI: 
      • Documentation: Uninstall TMC Self-Managed using the CLI
    • Installer UI: 
      • Documentation: Uninstall TMC Self-Managed using the Installer UI
• Option B (Cluster Deletion):
  • If the guest cluster hosting TMC-SM was deployed exclusively for this purpose, you can bypass the CLI uninstallation entirely by deleting the guest cluster directly from your Supervisor.