Safely Disassociate hosts from vCenter

[Alan_ORiordan]

Hi

My Windows vCenter DB is full (Windows 2008, SQL Express 2008) and it is not practical to continue to prune it with the amount of VM's we have (Three hosts and approx 35 VM's and replicas).

I want to go back to managing the hosts as standalone but I have never disassociated hosts from vCenter before. I know how to do it:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/537049

I don't know if it will have any effect on the running of the VM's the Veeam backups or replication/failover?

The jobs have been set up with the hosts as standalone hosts but are there any other considerations I should be aware of if I choose to decommission the vCenter server? I don't think any custom configurations or details have been made I just am wary of unwittingly clicking a button and causing a major issue

I also don't want to deploy a VCSA 5.5 and migrate at this time.

Thanks

[foggy]

If your jobs are pointed to the hosts directly (not via vCenter Server), decommission of vCenter will not affect them.

[blithespirit]

Something to think of, if your running SQL express DB then 35 vm should not fill your vCenter DB, rather than prune the database just reduce the data collection and time to keep the data. what retention do you really need for a vCenter DB? Examine why you need to capture so much and do you use that much, if yes then upgrade your DB to a full SQL instance and remove the worry or if not then reduce data collection or retention period. Try to keep VBR control with vCenter and not individual ESXi hosts would be my recommendation.