As a vSphere administrator, you might need to scale in the Supervisor to save cost. To reduce the capacity of a Supervisor, you can remove ESXi hosts from a cluster that uses a single vSphere Lifecycle Manager image.

When you remove a host from the Supervisor that is configured with NSX, vSphere with Tanzu clears the configuration of the Spherelet and stops the Spherelet process on the ESXi host. vSphere Lifecycle Manager then uninstalls the Spherelet VIB and image from the host and vSphere with Tanzu removes the host metadata from the cluster control plane.

Prerequisites

Before you can remove a host from a cluster, you must power off all virtual machines that are running on the host or migrate the virtual machines to a new host.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, navigate to the cluster from which you want to remove the host.
  2. Right-click the host and select Enter Maintenance Mode from the pop-up menu.
  3. In the confirmation dialog box that appears, click Yes.

    The confirmation dialog box also asks if you want to move virtual machines that are powered off to other hosts. Select this option if you want those virtual machines to remain registered to a host within the cluster.

    The host icon changes and the term “maintenance mode” is added to the name in parentheses.

  4. Select the host icon from the inventory, and drag it to the new location.
    The host can be moved to another cluster or another data center.

    vCenter Server moves the host to the new location.

  5. Right-click the host, and select Exit Maintenance Mode from the pop-up menu.
  6. (Optional) Restart any virtual machines, if needed.