Decommissioning a Node

About decommissioning nodes

If you are running the node controller or using the Kubernetes API datastore, you do not need to manually decommission nodes.

In other configurations, you may need to manually decommission a node for one of the following reasons.

• You are decommissioning a host running calico/node or removing it from your cluster.
• You are renaming a node.
• You are receiving an error about an IP address already in use.
• Readiness checks are failing due to unreachable peers that are no longer in the cluster.
• Hosts are regularly added and removed from your cluster.

Purpose of this page

Provide guidance on how to remove a host that is part of a Calico cluster and clean up the associated Node resource information.

Prerequisites

• Prior to removing any Node resource from the datastore the calico/node container should be stopped on the corresponding host and it should be ensured that it will not be restarted.
• You must have calicoctl configured and operational to run the commands listed here.

Removing a Node resource

Removing a Node resource will also remove the Workload Endpoint, Host Endpoint, and IP Address resources and any other sub configuration items associated with that Node.

Important

• Deleting a Node resource may be service impacting if the host is still in service. Ensure that the host is no longer in service before deleting the Node resource.
• Any configuration specific to the node will be removed. This would be configuration like node BGP peerings or custom Felix configs.

Removing a single Node resource

See the example below for how to remove a node with the calicoctl command.

Caution See Removing a Node resource above.

calicoctl delete node <nodeName>

Removing multiple Node resources

To remove several Nodes, a file can be created with several Node resources and then be passed to the calicoctl delete command with the -f flag. Below is an example of how to create a file of Nodes and delete them.

1. Create a file with the Node resources that need to be removed. For example:

   - apiVersion: projectcalico.org/v3
     kind: Node
     metadata:
       name: node-02
   - apiVersion: projectcalico.org/v3
     kind: Node
     metadata:
       name: node-03
   

2. To delete the nodes listed in the file pass it like below.

   Caution See Removing a Node resource above.

   calicoctl delete -f nodes_to_delete.yaml