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Version: 3.27 (latest)

Decommission a node

About decommissioning nodes

If you are running the node controller or using the Kubernetes API datastore in policy-only mode, 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 reference 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.

note
  • 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.

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
    calicoctl delete -f nodes_to_delete.yaml