How long should the task to remove a node from federation take to complete?

[kerrplunk77]

I will soon need to remove an old gen9 legacy 2-node cluster and a separate single node cluster from a federation.

New clusters have been deployed into the same federation and VM and backups are in the process of being migrated across.

On completion of the data migration into the new clusters, I intend to remove the old hosts from the federation and then vCentre inventory. 

How long does the remove task take to complete and are there any special steps or considerations when removing an entire cluster e.g. should HA/DRS be disabled first etc? 

Can anyone provide some indepth detail of what happens in terms of HA, what happens to the  data and some insight into the process that's happening behind the scenes? 

TIA

[Aditya_A · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Node removal doesn't take more than 2-3 minutes usually.
Once all data has been moved from the cluster or nodes, you can use HPE SimpliVity plug-in to remove the nodes from federation.

Node removal process will show tasks in vCenter citing removal of datastores, etc. Although much more happens in the background.

HA DRS don't have an impact on node removal process.

For more details, please go to page 58 here: (Remove a host from a federation)
 https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=a00131388en_us

Although, if done incorrectly, you may find yourself dealing with data loss, hence I strongly recommend you to engage support for the node removal once nodes are ready for decommissioning.

[kerrplunk77]

Thanks for the info.

Assuming all VMs have been migrated off the cluster and show a status of storage HA 'YES', in what scenario could there be potential for data loss?  Are you thinking of local backup data?

[Aditya_A]

Yes, all local backup residing on the cluster will be lost once the nodes are removed from cluster. Although backups can be moved within federation.
Moreover, support can help you remove entire clusters from federation in one step.

[Aditya_A]

Please let me know if you have any further queries.

[SimonAcha]

Hi team,

just quick question, does the removed node can still contain the back up storage on the simplivity node? can support still access the ovc ?

[Sunitha_Mod]

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