Introduction
This document describes how to decommission a Virtual Appliance (VA).
Overview
Sometimes you might have a requirement to either replace or remove a VA and in most environments, it is as easy as just switching DHCP to point to a new address, then waiting for the TTL for the lease to come around.
However, in some environments such as those where perhaps servers are using statically configured IP settings, it is harder to be 100% confident that the VA being removed is no longer service any traffic. At present, the standard reporting tools also do not provide 'per-VA' reporting capabilities. So how do you know when a VA no longer has any clients pointing to it?
Solution
You can use a combination of the 'Umbrella Sites' feature along with scheduled reports.
- Navigate to Deployments > Sites and Active Directory > Settings and Click Add New Site to create a new site for each VA being decommissioned. For example name the sites: decomVA1, decomVA2, and so on.
- Then go back to Sites and Active Directory to add VA1 to the site 'decomVA1' , VA2 to the site 'decomVA2' and so on.
Procedure can be found here: Manage Sites
Any DNS requests being pointed directly at those VA's are reported under the 'site' identity.
- You can create scheduled reports for each new 'site' to view a log of the traffic each VA processed each day/week.
More information on how to schedule a report can be found here: Schedule a Report
The report show the internal source IP the VA saw the DNS request originate from. Keep in mind that if an ADMapping (Username-to-IP mapping) still exists for a user, this also can be reported.
- You can then find the last few hosts (if there are any) and configure them to point to the new DNS server.
- Power down and delete the VA to be decommissioned.
Feedback