Removing the vCD Agent from hosts

When re-installing my vCD home lab I had an issue when I went to re-add some hosts which had already been used in a vCD environment, this was because the hosts had already been “prepared” by vCD and therefore had the “vcloud-agent” vib installed.  Of course you would normally unprepare these from the vCD web interface before deleting your vCD instance but I forgot to do this.

I was then pointed to Chris Colotti’s post here which showed how to manually remove the vCD agent from hosts in this situation.

As I had a few of them to do I didn’t want to repeat myself and therefore wrote a quick PowerCLI Script to remove the agents for me.

Another thing I couldn’t see in Chris’s post which I had to do before it was fully removed was reboot the host so I added that into the script too.

Checking for hosts with the vCD Agent installed

We can easily see the hosts which have the vCD agent installed by running the following PowerCLI code:

Connect-VIServer MyVIServer -User Administrator –Password “Pa$$word”
Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Foreach {
    $ESXCLI = Get-EsxCli -VMHost $_ -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    $ESXCLI.software.vib.list() | Where { $_.Name -like "*vCloud*"} | Select @{N="VMHost";E={$ESXCLI.VMHost}}, Name, Version
}

We would receive the following output:

image

Removing the vCD Agents

Due to an issue with the way PowerCLI calls ESXCLI I have had to make the script slightly more complicated than it needs to be but it still does the job.  It will go through each host and remove the “vcloud-agent” vib and then reboot them ready to be added into the new vCD instance.

# The following two variables are used to define the esx hosts local login details
$HostUser = "root"
$HostPass = "localpa$$"

$vCenter = Connect-VIServer MyviServer -User Administrator –Password “Pa$$word”
Get-Cluster | Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Foreach {
    $ESXCLI = Get-EsxCli -VMHost $_ -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
     $vCDHosts = $ESXCLI.software.vib.list() | Where { $_.Name -like "*vCloud*"} | Select @{N="VMHost";E={$ESXCLI.VMHost}}, Name, Version
    $vCDHosts
}

$vCenter | Disconnect-VIServer -Force -Confirm:$false

# Because of a bug in PowerCLI with ESXCLI we need to connect to each host individually and not through vCenter
$vCDHosts | Foreach {
    $VMHCon = Connect-VIServer ($_.VmHost) -User $HostUser -Password $HostPass
    Write-Host "Removing vCloud Agent for $($_.VMHost)"
    $ESXCLI = Get-EsxCli -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    $ESXCLI.software.vib.remove($false, $true, $false, $true, $_.Name)
    # During testing I found a reboot was needed
    Write-Host "Rebooting host $($_.VMHost)"
    Restart-VMHost -VMHost $_.VmHost -Confirm:$false
    $VMHCon | Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$false
}

3 thoughts on “Removing the vCD Agent from hosts

  1. Pingback: vCloud Director agent’i nasıl silinir? | VMware Virtualization Blog

  2. sab gen

    instated of connecting to ESXi Host directly.
    when we have to remove a vib from more than 100+ esxi host .. We have to connect all server servers to remove the module? it too loaded. Is there any way that we can connect to vCenter using powercli and then read the esxcli of the host. and remove the vib 

  3. Pingback: Removing the vCloud Director agent - Yellow Bricks

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