This post would be compact/small version of my new page “vCloud Director – Uninstalling Agent” which showing all steps I toke to remove “vCloud Director Agent” from ESXi hosts.
Summary of what happened in the past
I had vCloud Director 1.5 and SQL database for it in my home lab which contain two “VMware ESXi 5.0” and “VMware vCenter 5.0” respectively.
As it wasn’t functioning well for some reason, I removed both vCloud Director and it’s database and re-installed new vCloud Director 1.5 on the same infrastructure.
And where the problems begin
As I removed old vCloud Director without removing it’s vDC and disconnecting my hosts, it’s agent remain on these two hosts and as I tried to create nee vDC, I get an error on installing new agent.
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How to solve it
I searched the internet and in first result saw a great/familiar* line “esxcli software vib remove -n vcloud-agent” which posted by “Chris Colotti” on his site.
I lunched the putty and checked the agent state on both hosts by using below command:
esxcli software vib list | grep vcloud
Then I tried to uninstall the agents on 1st host by running following command:
esxcli software vib remove -n=vcloud-agent
I get an error and removing process failed because it wasn’t in the maintenance mode, so I prepared all things and put this host in the maintenance mode and rerun the command again:
esxcli software vib remove -n=vcloud-agent
Because putting 1st host in the maintenance mode toke a long time I thought there should be a way to preventing it, and the result was lied in the result of this command:
esxcli software vib remove --help
Below screen showing interesting parameter in the “esxcli software vib remove” command
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I tried previous command while adding “–maintenance-mode” parameter and it worked perfectly.
esxcli software vib remove -n="vcloud-agent" --maintenance-mode
Note #1:
Running command in the 1st line would be terminated by showing an error while second line command would be finish successfully while it intend to do the same task as first line. adding double quote (“) in these case may prevent some problems.
esxcli software vib remove -n=vcloud-agent --maintenance-mode esxcli software vib remove -n="vcloud-agent" --maintenance-mode
Note #2:
It was familiar because I used similar command for adding/installing some VIBs from HP.
