remove datastore from vSphere 5.0 with HA folder

thanks Arun. I have a few other datastores available for HA.

May I do this to the hosts during production hours? I do have ten or so VMs running on these hosts, on another storage device than the one I am removing of course.

I found this

http://arritdor.e-wilkin.com/2012/03/removing-vmfs-datastore.html

which I believe addresses my issue with screenshots and directions. Does it look correct?

Thanks again

thanks Andrew. I looked into that and found this

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2013249

do you have directions you can quickly share on how to properly do what you stated?

thanks again

Yes, that looks correct, but you may get issues

with

1. HA Agent (FDM)
2. Storage I/O control!

if it fails to unmount or delete the issues will be 1 or 2, or both!

Well, you can put the host in maintenance mode, remove them from the cluster and their entries will be removed from the heartbeat datastore respectively.

that's hot to stop the FDM Agents.

Arun - I need them to stay live if possible during this.

Andrew - I am looking into stopping the agents on each host, not the service. Also, Storage I/O is not configfured, so hopefully only issue 1 may arise, but I am looking into stopping the agent so it shouldn't.

thank you both. any info on stopping the agent on each host is appreciated. Thought this was going to be a simple process - then I found HA -poweron and -hb. Ugh.

The FDM agent is the one which initiates the communication. Stopping the FDM service will stop the HA agent. Check the /etc/init.d path for FDM service.

thanks Arun. Still worried about failover attempts if I stop the service.

Can I just disable HA on the cluster and then re-enable after removing the datastores? Don't laugh at that question ;-)

If you do that, it will re-configure HA all over again, although that would surely help.

That may be a good method. I'm adding a new host, moving vm's to it, and would like it to be master anyway.

Can I disable  / re-enable without issue during production hours?
Thanks.

Thx Andrew. I'll try that.

Yes, you can disable/re-enable without issues.

But we would advise all good Service Practioners in the IT Service Industry, to always completed changes out of core hours.

I was thinking that myself and decided to hold out until this tonight or this weekend.

Thanks

looking to do this over the weekend. However, I asked the following question if either or both of you would like to comment.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28420284/move-vSphere-HA-folder-to-another-datastore-by-choosing-datastore.html

Thx