Removing the vCloud Director agent

I had to remove the vCloud Director agent from 14 hosts today after an upgrade. I had to do it manually and I figured I would “document” the process. Although just a couple of steps it might be useful for others who need to do the same thing.

First list all currently installed vibs:

esxcli software vib list | grep vcloud

This will tell you if it is installed and the full name of the vib. Next you can remove it:

esxcli software vib remove -n vcloud-agent --maintenance-mode

Note that I added “–maintenance-mode”, this allows me to remove the vcloud-agent vib without the host being in maintenance mode. In most scenarios you will want the host to be in maintenance mode of course, but as this is a lab environment and I had nothing running on these hosts I figured this was the quickest way.

Chris Colotti also wrote an article on this topic which also includes how to remove “older” vCD agents. This article by Alan Renouf can also come in handy when you need to do dozens of hosts as Alan shows the PowerCLI fully automated way of doing it.