I posted about “retreat mode” and how to delete the vCLS VMs when needed a while back, including a quick demo. Back then you needed to configure an advanced setting for a cluster if you wanted to delete the VMs for whatever reason. (Usually for troubleshooting purposes people would do a delete/recreate.) Starting with vSphere 8.0 U2 you can now use the UI to enable retreat mode on a per cluster level. How do you do this? well fairly straight forward:
- Click on the cluster you would want to delete the VMs for
- Click on Configure
- Click on “General” under “vSphere Cluster Services”
- Click on “EDIT VCLS MODE”
- Click on “Retreat Mode” and click “OK”
Now the VMs will be deleted, if you want to recreate the VMs, follow the same procedure, but change “Retreat Mode” to “System Managed”. I tested the process yesterday and created a quick demo for you:
Quick and Great demonstration
This is a huge help, in my case as a cloud provider we have been needing to configure this to decommission clusters and the settings stay in the config files unless manually removed for a cluster which does not exist anymore.