Cleaning up and re-installing Cisco HX (HyperFlex) Cluster
During testing and validation or for whatever reason you might want to do a factory cleanup of a Cisco HX cluster. This is generally not a trivial task if you want to follow the TAC directed steps for cleanup. At a high level, you need to accomplish three things
- Cleanup the Hypervisor by gracefully removing the HX Controller VMs and the VIBs
- Cleanup vCenter by removing plugins and other HX Installer configured settings
- Cleanup UCS Manager and remove whatever HX Installer has created (most of it).
After going through the step-by-step process of cleaning up ESXi, through cli and vCenter, I have come to the conclusion that it is best to just reinstall ESXi. Only caveat is to only use the Cisco custom HX ESXi image from CCO. (if you use any other image, HX will not install, and will fail!) Re-installing ESXi is quicker, and cleaner and will leave you happier at the end of the day
As far as vCenter, there are really only two steps once you remove the cluster from vCenter.
First step is to remove two of the plugins by going to https://yourvCenter.orIPaddress/mob, logging in with your vCenter administrator credentials and then follwing the steps below.
then click on ExtensionManager
Notice two extensions with the name ‘springpath’, we’ll need to unregister these both by clicking ‘UnregisterExtension’ and typing the extension names without the double quotes.
.You should see this message – Method Invocation Result: void telling you that this was successful, do this for the other extension too.
The second step is to remove the client plug-in. This can be found under the ‘Administration’ tab. The plug-in you should delete is called ‘Springpath Plugin’
The Last step of cleaning up UCS Manager is best done from the CLI if you have access to it, otherwise you can just follow the four steps below.
- Click on Servers and delete the Sub-Organization under root that was created by HX Installer VM.
- Delete all VLANs execpt the one that you use for management.
- Under LAN tab, delete the Multicast Policy called ‘HyperFlex’
- Disassociate the service profiles from the servers (if not already completed)
Optional CLI Step – SSH into UCS Fabric Interconnects one by one and execute the following commands
UCS-FI-A# connect local-mgmt
UCS-FI-A (local-mgmt)# erase configuration
UCS-FI-A (local-mgmt)# reboot
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