What happens to the VM guests when you destroy a cluster?

Eric_Price
Eric_Price used Ask the Experts™
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I have a three node Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 cluster I'd like to "destroy" so I can repurpose some 10GB NICs and switch ports. I have a small handful of VM guests left on one of the three hosts. All of the VM config and storage has been moved to local disk (DAS) on that one host.

What will happen to those guests if I "destroy" the cluster in the Failover Cluster Manager console?
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Technical Architect - HA/Compute/Storage
Commented:
Do they show up in Hyper-V Management for that node?

You could remove their HA capability so that they are permanently sitting on that node, evict the other two nodes from the cluster, then finish off by destroying the cluster.

The VMs should still be there untouched on the host.

Of course, have a known good backup at hand just in case.
Eric_Price

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Commented:
Yes they show up in Hyper-V management.  I mean, it seems REASONABLE that they would survive - after all you can also run a Hyper-V guest on a cluster node without the guest actually being part of the cluster, but I dont know for sure. Destroy is such a harsh word... lol

A restoration event would be VERY disruptive (part of the reason these guests didnt make the move with the others to the new cluster).

I guess unless someone who comes along and looks credible and says "I've done this, you're fine"  I'll lab this one up and see what happens.
Philip ElderTechnical Architect - HA/Compute/Storage

Commented:
It should be okay. We do work with folks that have non-HA VMs running on cluster nodes.

Are you able to Live Migrate the entire VM to another cluster or Hyper-V server?

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