You can remove unwanted nodes from a cluster, one node at a time. After you remove a node, you must also remove its failover partner. If you are removing a node, then its data becomes inaccessible or erased.

Before you begin

The following conditions must be satisfied before removing nodes from the cluster:

More than half of the nodes in the cluster must be healthy.
All of the data on the node that you want to remove must have been evacuated.
- This might include purging data from an encrypted volume.
All non-root volumes have been moved from aggregates owned by the node.
All non-root aggregates have been deleted from the node.
If the node owns Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) disks or self-encrypting disks (SEDs), disk encryption has been removed by returning the disks to unprotected mode.
- You might also want to sanitize FIPS drives or SEDs.
Data LIFs have been deleted or relocated from the node.
Cluster management LIFs have been relocated from the node and the home ports changed.
All intercluster LIFs have been removed.
- When you remove intercluster LIFs a warning is displayed that can be ignored.
Storage failover has been disabled for the node.
All LIF failover rules have been modified to remove ports on the node.
All VLANs on the node have been deleted.
If you have LUNs on the node to be removed, you should modify the Selective LUN Map (SLM) reporting-nodes list before you remove the node.

If you do not remove the node and its HA partner from the SLM reporting-nodes list, access to the LUNs previously on the node can be lost even though the volumes containing the LUNs were moved to another node.

It is recommended that you issue an AutoSupport message to notify Fujitsu Support that node removal is underway.

Note: You must not perform operations such as cluster remove-node, cluster unjoin, and node rename when an automated ONTAP upgrade is in progress.

About this task

If you are running a mixed-version cluster, you can remove the last low-version node by using one of the advanced privilege commands beginning with ONTAP 9.7:
- ONTAP 9.7 and later: cluster remove-node -skip-last-low-version-node-check
If you unjoin 2 nodes from a 4-node cluster, cluster HA is automatically enabled on the two remaining nodes.

All system and user data, from all disks that are connected to the node, must be made inaccessible to users before removing a node from the cluster. If a node was incorrectly unjoined from a cluster, contact Fujitsu Support for assistance with options for recovery.

Steps

Change the privilege level to advanced:

set -privilege advanced
Verify if a nodes on the cluster holds epsilon:

cluster show -epsilon true
1. If a node holds epsilon, change its eligibility to false.
  
  cluster modify -node <node_name> -eligibility false
If the node you want to remove is the current master node, then enable another node in the cluster to be elected as the master node by changing the master node’s cluster eligibility to false:

cluster modify –eligibility false

The master node is the node that holds processes such as “mgmt”, “vldb”, “vifmgr”, “bcomd”, and “crs”. The cluster ring show advanced command shows the current master node.
```
cluster::*> cluster modify -node node1 -eligibility false
```
Log into the remote node management LIF or the cluster-management LIF on a node other than the one that is being removed.
Remove the node from the cluster:

For this ONTAP version… Use this command…

ONTAP 9.7 and later

cluster remove-node

If you have a mixed version cluster and you are removing the last lower version node, use the -skip-last-low-version-node-check parameter with these commands.

The system informs you of the following:
- You must also remove the node’s failover partner from the cluster.
- After the node is removed and before it can rejoin a cluster, you must use boot menu option (4) Clean configuration and initialize all disks or option (9) Configure Advanced Drive Partitioning to erase the node’s configuration and initialize all disks.
  
  A failure message is generated if you have conditions that you must address before removing the node. For example, the message might indicate that the node has shared resources that you must remove or that the node is in a cluster HA configuration or storage failover configuration that you must disable.
  
  If the node is the quorum master, the cluster will briefly lose and then return to quorum. This quorum loss is temporary and does not affect any data operations.
If a failure message indicates error conditions, address those conditions and rerun the cluster remove-node or cluster unjoin command.

The node is automatically rebooted after it is successfully removed from the cluster.
If you are repurposing the node, erase the node configuration and initialize all disks:
1. During the boot process, press Ctrl-C to display the boot menu when prompted to do so.
2. Select the boot menu option (4) Clean configuration and initialize all disks.
Return to admin privilege level:

set -privilege admin
Repeat the preceding steps to remove the failover partner from the cluster.

For this ONTAP version…	Use this command…
ONTAP 9.7 and later	`cluster remove-node`

After you finish

If you removed nodes to have a single-node cluster, you should modify the cluster ports to serve data traffic by modifying the cluster ports to be data ports, and then creating data LIFs on the data ports.