Uninstall Hyper flex; Clean Install ESXi 8.0

[odhkdukah93]

We have a HyperFlex Edge cluster with 2 nodes. We don't use HyperFlex Edge nor do we manage the nodes via Intersight. Interestingly enough, the HyperFlex web portal for our hosts shows it is tied to an account. We do utilize these hosts for our Cisco UC VMs.

My question would be, can I proceed to?:

Export all VMs to a backup server.

Purge the Storage Controller VMs

Reboot, and then perform a clean install of ESXi for all nodes using the Cisco Custom Image.

Import all VMs from the backup server and operate with vCenter.

Our business has UCS C220 M6S hosts.

[Riaan van Niekerk]

We have done the same, repurposing HX nodes for vSAN. You should be fine.

One thing we noticed was that when we log support calls for UCS related issues, we were routed to the HX support team, since the server and FI SNs were tied to the HX solution. We still got the support we needed.

“the HyperFlex web portal for our hosts shows it is tied to an account”: I assume your HX cluster shows in HX Connect as tied to a Cisco Smart Licensing account. This can be ignored / will go away when you wipe HXDP.

[Steven Tardy]

Yes. You own the hardware. You can do whatever you want with that hardware.

Like Riaan said calling into Cisco TAC can get complicated as this "appliance" hardware is no longer an "appliance" but your support contract still provides support for the hardware.

One important often overlooked Bill-of-Materials design choice for Hyperflex is the fact that HCI (Hyperflex / vSAN / etc) uses a non-RAID JBOD-only disk controller (UCSC-SAS-220M6). Whereas most often a typical standalone server would have a full RAID capable disk controller (UCSC-RAID-220M6). You'll likely want to aggregate all of the disks into one storage pool but to do that requires replacing the disk controller UCSC-SAS-220M6 (or HX-SAS-220M6) with UCSC-RAID-220M6.