r/vxrail

Hi All,

i'm in charge of decom a VXrail cluster soon and unfortunetly our Dell support contract is not up anymore, so i'm alone on this point.

I wanted to know if someone can confirm my process or have one to follow ?

Environment:

• VxRail 8.0.370-29422450, standalone (customer-managed vCenter, not VCF/SDDC Manager
• Stretched Cluster (2 fault domains + witness)
• Same vCenter also hosts a second, unrelated VxRail cluster

Goal: fully remove this cluster from vCenter cleanly, without breaking the other cluster or the shared NFS.

Planned approach (unconfirmed):

1. Confirm datastore empty (esxcli vsan debug vmdk list)
2. Remove hosts from shared VDS uplinks/port groups (not deleting the VDS itself)
3. vSAN decommission per Broadcom KB 392097: retreat mode → remove disk groups (Maintenance Mode, "No data migration") → manually remove Fault Domains + Witness (stretched-specific) → disable vSAN VMkernel service → turn off HA → turn off vSAN service cluster-wide
4. Put all hosts in Maintenance Mode, then delete the vSphere cluster object directly (not host-by-host removal, since that path is blocked)
5. Manually delete the VxRail Manager VM for this cluster afterward, accept potential residual/orphaned state in VxRail Manager's internal DB (hardware is being destroyed anyway, no future redeploy planned)
6. Peripheral cleanup: DNS, AD, iDRAC/OMIVV/SCG, firewall rules, Commvault/backup jobs, licensing

My open question: has anyone actually deleted a standalone (non-VCF) VxRail cluster object directly from vCenter after zeroing out vSAN, without going through VxRail Manager's node-removal workflow? Did it leave VxRail Manager in a broken state, and did that actually matter for you (especially if hardware wasn't being reused)?

Any first-hand experience, even partial, appreciated — trying to avoid surprises mid-teardown with no Dell safety net.

Thanks in advance !

Our VXRail environment consists of 3 hosts, a SAN, and 2 Dell S4128T switches set up for redundancy with VLT. The switches are end of life and will be out of support so we plan to replace them with 2 Cisco Catalyst 9300s. Two things we are evaluating:

- Should the Cisco switches be set up in a stack or set up independently with the use of something like stackwise virtual or VMWare ESXi NIC teaming/failover to create redundancy? The stack seems to make the most sense outside of the times when we need to take it down for maintenance, firmware upgrades, etc. It seems the whole environment would come down if they are managed under one plane.

- Whichever option we choose: how should the actual changeover take place from old switches to new? It would be nice to do it without having to shut the entire environment down but I am not sure that is possible.

Just curious if anyone is using Dell OMNI Smart Fabric integrated with VMware / VxRail? We’re in the process of deploying new hardware (Dell servers and NetApp) in a new cluster within existing vCenter (VxRail with OMNI). This is a traditional server and SAN. Is it possible to create a new server profile and assign those ports to the new hardware is connected too? We’ve done this with other environments using VxRail but they were not Dell OMNI. Since it’s tightly integrated with VMware / VxRail (HCI), hoping it will still work on new hardware as long as profiles and ports are assigned and configured. If not, we’ll have to spec out a new core switches. Hoping to avoid that but if we have to then it might be best.