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

title	date	description	featured	draft	toc	usePageBundles	codeLineNumbers	series	tags	comment
Removing and Recreating vCLS VMs	2022-07-23T16:25:05-05:00	How to remove and (optionally) recreate the vSphere Clustering Services VMs	false	true	true	true	false	Tips	vmware vsphere	true

Way back in 2020, VMware released vSphere 7 Update 1 and introduced the new vSphere Clustering Services (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.

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.