virtuallypotato/content/posts/removing-recreating-vcls-vms/index.md

---
title: "Removing and Recreating vCLS VMs" # Title of the blog post.
date: 2022-07-23T16:25:05-05:00 # Date of post creation.
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description: "How to remove and (optionally) recreate the vSphere Clustering Services VMs" # Description used for search engine.
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---

Way back in 2020, VMware released vSphere 7 Update 1 and introduced the new [vSphere Clustering Services (vCLS)](https://core.vmware.com/resource/introduction-vsphere-clustering-service-vcls) to improve how cluster services like the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) operate. vCLS deploys lightweight agent VMs directly on the cluster being managed, and those VMs provide a decoupled and distributed control plane to offload some of the management responsibilities from the vCenter server. 

![vCLS VM](vcls-vm.png)

That's very cool, particularly in large continent-spanning environments or those which reach into multiple clouds, but it may not make sense to add those additional workloads in resource-constrained homelabs. And while the vCLS VMs are supposed to be automagically self-managed, sometimes things go a little wonky and that management fails to function correctly, which can negatively impact DRS. Recovering from such a scenario is complicated by the complete inability to manage the vCLS VMs through the vSphere UI.

Fortunately there's a somewhat-hidden way to disable (and re-enable) vCLS on a per-cluster basis, and it's easy to do once you know the trick. This can help if you want to permanently disable vCLS (like in a lab environment) or if you just need to turn it off and on again[^off-and-on] to clean up and redeploy uncooperative agent VMs.

[^off-and-on]: ![](off-and-on.gif)

### Find the cluster's domain ID
It starts with determining the affected cluster's domain ID, which is very easy to do once you know where to look.