ESXi 5.1 host physically removed before unmapping SAN storage

king daddy
king daddy used Ask the Experts™
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Greetings,

An ESXi 5.1 host was physically removed before iSCSI SAN storage was unmounted/detached/unmapped and the host rescanned. The host was / is being decommissioned and no VMs were running on it. It was removed from vCenter management a while back and was not part of a cluster. It had been powered off for about a month before being taken from the rack.

I still see the host on the EMC and the HP SANs. Can I remove the host from the SANs without causing the SANs or other hosts to freeze up (all paths down or some other issue)? Is it better to just leave the removed host on the SANs? There are only 2 hosts here managed by vCenter and in a cluster so it's not a big cluster with several hosts.

Thanks for any help
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VMware and Virtualization Consultant
Fellow 2018
Expert of the Year 2017
Commented:
It's not best practice, in what's been done.

But removing IQN or WWNNs from SAN, should not cause any issues to remaining hosts.

Just make sure you do remove the correct Hosts!
king daddy

Author

Commented:
Thanks Andrew. To be clear, can I simply remove the host from each SAN without actually unmapping all the datastores / LUNS?

I was worried about doing that since there is no server there to connect to and didn't want the SANs to freak out when it couldn't connect to the host to remove it. I may just leave it alone until I have time to be at the datacenter in case there is an issue.

Thanks again as usual.
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert / EE Fellow)VMware and Virtualization Consultant
Fellow 2018
Expert of the Year 2017
Commented:
Thanks Andrew. To be clear, can I simply remove the host from each SAN without actually unmapping all the datastores / LUNS?

Yes.

If there is no incoming connection from that Host, and there is not, because it's gone, no problems.
king daddy

Author

Commented:
great. Thanks.
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert / EE Fellow)VMware and Virtualization Consultant
Fellow 2018
Expert of the Year 2017

Commented:
no probs.

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