Decommissioning vCenter and PSC 6.0 f

We have just consolidated all our work load in two data centres down to one data centre and using the cloud as our DR site. So as we now have only one site it was time to decommission the PSC (Appliance version) and vCenter (Windows version) in the old data centre.

Here are the steps I followed to remove vCenter and PSC from my lab environment assuming you are running at least vSphere 6.0 Update 1 otherwise the command "cmsso-util" will not be available by default. I followed KB article 2106736 but added some steps I took.

• On the vCenter that you are going to decommission ensure that you have no more host managed by this vCenter. Check which PSC it is registered to by going to the web client. Select “vCenter > Manage > Settings > Advanced Settings” and look for “config.vpxd.sso.admin.uri”
• Now log on to the PSC where the vCenter is registered to via SSH or console as user “root”
• Run “shell.set --enabled True”
• Then run “shell”
• Run the command cmsso-util unregister --node-pnid vCenterServer_System_Name --username administrator@your_domain_name --passwd vCenter_Single_Sign_On_password. Replace "vCenterServer_System_Name" with your vCenter FQDN. For "administrator@your_domain_name" replace that with the vSphere domain SSO administrator details i.e. [email protected] and for "vCenter_Single_Sign_On_password" replace that with the password of the account you are going to use. Example "cmsso-util unregister --node-pnid vcenter6.myvmx.local --username [email protected] --passwd abcd123"
• Once you run this command you will receive a warning message “WARNING This step is irreversible! Are you sure you want to unregister host vcenter6.myvmx.local?”. At this point you can still type “N” to quit otherwise if you are happy then go ahead then type “y”
• It will run a command to unregister your vCenter with the PSC and this could a bit of time and you should get response messages of “success”
• Once that command has completed and has been successful then you can power off vCenter as it is not part of the solution anymore. You can now delete the decommission the VM with your usual process
• If you log into your vCenter. Go to "Administration > System Configuration > Nodes" you should see that the vCenter is not registered at all.

Our next step is to decommission our PSC as well from our environment. 

• Log on to a PSC that you WILL NOT be decommissioning and has a replication relationship with the PSC that you are decommissioning. If you are not sure if it has a relationship then we can do the following 
• Log on to the PSC via SSH or console
• Run “shell.set --enabled True”
• Run “shell”
• Run “cd /usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin” which will take us to the directory where the replication admin command is
• Run the command  "./vdcrepadmin -f showpartners -h Source_hostname -u Source_username -w Source_password" . Replace "source_hostname" as the PSC you are currently on, use the vSphere "Administrator" account as the "source_username" and use the password for this account. Example would be ./vdcrepadmin -f showpartners -h psc1.myvmx.local -u administrator -w abcd1234 
• This will show the partners that is connected to the PSC that you are currently on
• You can then run this command "./vdcrepadmin -f showpartnerstatus -h Source_hostname -u Source_username -w Source_password which will tell you the status of the partners with this PSC
• Once you are satisfied that this PSC is a partner with the PSC you wish to decommission then we run same "cmsso-util" command on this PSC "cmsso-util unregister --node-pnid Platform_Services_Controller_System_Name --username administrator@your_domain_name --passwd vCenter_Single_Sign_On_password". Replace "Platform_Services-Controller-System_Name" with your FQDN of the PSC that you wish to decommission. "Change administrator@your_domain_name" with your vSphere SSO domain name. Example "cmsso-util unregister --node-pnid psc6.myvmx.local --username [email protected] --passwd abcd123"
• Again you will receive a message that  "This step is irreversible!" and if you are happy to continue then press “y” otherwise “n”. Once this command is successful then you will see that the node of this goes from vCenter as well in "Administration > System Configuration > Nodes"

I did hit across one issue when I performed the above in my production environment. When I logged in to the web client. I was still receiving this message "Could not connect to one or more vCenter Server systems: https://vCenter_Server_Name:443/sdk"

I SSH back to my working PSC and ran the command "./vdcrepadmin -f showpartners -h Source_hostname -u Source_username -w Source_password"  (replace informatiion where needed) which showed that I still had a relationship with the old PSC. I found a command called "vdcleavefed" where you can use it to remove an offline server.

So as an example I used "./vdcleavefed -h vcenter6.myvmx.local -u administrator -w abcd1234". You will see it goes through the process to remove from the "federation" and once completed you may need to wait for a while for the replication to complete. After that I logged back in to vCenter and the message went away.