I recently ran into a situation where a customer had removed a vcenter server from their environment and built another but had not decommissioned the first from the PSC. When they were trying to view some screens that showed data across the environment, the interface would time out looking for that vCenter.
There is a VMWare KB that talks about the process to follow in decommissioning a vCenter server that needs to be removed from the PSC. That process only succeeds if the vCenter server is still available.
Given that the fqdn of the vCenter server was VC1.corp.local
- SSH to the PSC.
- CD to /usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin/
- Run the command ./vdcleavefed -h VC1.corp.local -u administrator
- Enter the administrator@vsphere.local password:
- If the command is successful, you are prompted with:
- ‘ vdcleavefd offline for server VC1.corp.local Leave federation cleanup done’
Some common errors:
“Leave federation cleanup failed. Error[13] – Confidentiality required.”
Check the FQDN or try using the IP address in its place
“Error (9234) – User invalid credential”
Check the username and password. When I used the domain qualified user administrator@vsphere.local, I received this error. Using only administrator with the password for administrator@vsphere.local worked for me.
If you run into any unexpected errors the log can be found at
/storage/log/vmware/vmdir/vdcleavefed.log
GARNEYFLANCH 