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Demo Time: How to delete the vCLS VMs

Duncan Epping · Oct 27, 2020 ·

As I have a bunch of questions about how you can delete the vSphere Cluster Service VMs (vCLS VMs) I figured I would create a quick demo. It is pretty straightforward, and it should only be used when people are doing some kind of full cluster maintenance. This demo shows you how to get the VMs deleted by leveraging a vCenter Server Level Advanced setting (config.vcls.clusters.domain-c<identifier>.enabled). I have also written a post that has a bunch of requirements, Q&A, and considerations for the vCLS VMs, if you are interested in that read it here.

Here’s the summary of how to delete the VMs: Go to your vCenter Server object, go to the configure tab, then go to “Advanced Settings”, add the key “config.vcls.clusters.domain-c<identifier>.enabled” and set it to false. The domain “c-number” for your cluster can be found in the URL when you click on the cluster. It should look something like the following, where the bold part is the important bit: https://vcsa-06.rainpole.com/ui/app/cluster;nav=h/urn:vmomi:ClusterComputeResource:domain-c22:4df0badc-1655-40de-9181-3422d6c36a3e/summary. If you want to recreate the VMs, simply set the value to “true” when the deletion task has completed.

Note, if you have a resource pool configuration, enabling “retreat mode” (disabling vCLS)) doesn’t impact resource pools in any shape or form, it just impacts DRS load balancing. Anyway, I hope you find the demo useful.

Related

Server 7.0 u1, 7.0 update 1, update 1, vcls, vSphere, vsphere cluster, vsphere cluster service

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Serhei says

    11 November, 2020 at 15:02

    What is a workaround when all vCLs VMs were deleted? How to recreate them?

    • Duncan Epping says

      12 November, 2020 at 12:48

      If they have been deleted you enable vCLS again using the advanced setting shown in the demo. If for whatever reason they just disappeared, add the advanced setting with “False”, wait for 60 seconds, then change the value to “True” and they should pop up again.

  2. Kevin says

    19 January, 2021 at 11:21

    Hello,

    I would like to reinstall totally my vCenter. I’m going to delete my vCenter VM for that. What is the best practice concerning vCLS before that, please ?

    • Duncan Epping says

      19 January, 2021 at 12:19

      I would recommend enabling Retreat mode so that the vCLS VMs are deleted before you add the hosts to the new vCenter Server.

  3. Ron says

    23 March, 2021 at 15:17

    Greetings Duncan! Big fan! Is there a way to programmatically grab the cluster number needed to be able to automate this with powercli … I have a 4node self managed vsan cluster, and once upgrading to 7U1+ my shutdown and startup scripts need tweaking (bc the vCLS VMs do not behave well for this use case workflow). An alternative could be to not use DRS and HA … but I would like the customer to gain the benefits of these important features … I’ve scrubbed the communities site (to no avail for my use case), and bf I call support I figured I’d ask …

    • Duncan Epping says

      23 March, 2021 at 17:47

      William actually has examples of how to retrieve the MoRef for various objects, like the cluster: https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/11/vsphere-moref-managed-object-reference.html. Hope this helps, and thanks for the compliments!

  4. Ron says

    24 March, 2021 at 18:30

    Thx Duncan. Figured it out for my use case, and posted to communities https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-vCenter-Discussions/disable-vCLS-need-to-delete-vCenter-advanced-option-name/m-p/2837907/highlight/true#M42545

    • Duncan Epping says

      25 March, 2021 at 10:38

      that is awesome, thanks for sharing!

  5. Joe Cooper says

    22 September, 2021 at 02:10

    In order to retire an old datastore that vCLS VMs were placed on I put my cluster into retreat mode. The VMs did not delete themselves. So I went ahead and manually powered off and deleted the VMs. Now, at this point, after taking the cluster out of retreat mode and turning DRS back on the vCLS VMs are not being recreated and the cluster is showing the expected vSphere DRS functionality alert. Is there any way to force the cluster to re-provision the vCLS VMs?

    Thanks,

    Joe

  6. Roland says

    20 October, 2021 at 11:51

    thanks for sharing. I had the problem that from the three vCLS VMs only one was available. The other two were sitting on an unavailable datastore… so I had no chance to manupualte them. So I just did your procedure: All VMs were deleted and then recreated on proper datastores.

  7. Fabien says

    26 November, 2021 at 15:42

    Hello, what about disabling vCLS permently when you only have only 2 hosts in the cluster and no DRS license ? Will it impact HA ? HA relies on DRS to restart VM but since there is only 2 hosts in the cluster, if one fails it should not need much computation to know where to restart the VMs. 🙂

    • Duncan Epping says

      29 November, 2021 at 12:16

      Sure, you can do that. But keep in mind that over time vCLS will be used by HA as well. So disabling it may cause problems in the future.

      • ferdinho says

        12 January, 2022 at 23:15

        Hello Duncan, I have My vCLS on “inaccessible” status, What can I do?

  8. Justin says

    27 May, 2022 at 20:04

    Awesome. Made the jump from 6.7 to 7.0.3 and several clusters had bad vcls vm’s that were basically in emergency (im doing nothing) “Grub rescue>” . this cleaned up those clusters including the bad ones.

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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