NSX 3 Uninstall, Quick Guide

In this post, we’ll cover a quick overview of removing NSX 3.0 from your environment. While I don’t see this being a common task, I’ve done this half a dozen times, so I can get more experience doing the install again.

Change VM networks.

The first step is to ensure nothing is using the NSX Segments. Go through vCenter and change the networks of any VMs using an NSX segment to use a local switch. Through the NSX interface, you can see the number of ports being used by VMs and if you click on the number, it will tell you what VMs are configured to use that segment.

Remove Segments

Once you have all the VMs off of the segments, delete the segments.

Delete Brigde Profiles

If you create a Bridge configuration for any segments, you will have to remove the profile. Under Networking | Segments | Edge Bridge Profile, delete the exsiting profile(s).

Delete T1 Gateway

With the segments removed you can safely delete the T1 Gateway.

Edge Clusters

To remove the Edge Transport Nodes, you will need to have them removed form the Edge Cluster(s). Go to Systems | Fabric | Nodes | Edge Clusters and either delete the Edge Cluster or remove all nodes from them.

Remove Edge Transport Nodes

Through Systems | Fabric | Nodes | Edge Transport Nodes, Delete the nodes.

Unconfigure the Cluster

Now with the previous settings removed, we can remove NSX from the ESXi hosts. In System | Fabric | Nodes | Host Transport Nodes, select the cluster and click Remove NSX. This will take a few minutes to complete.

Remove the Compute Managers

This step isn’t necessary, but will leave things in a cleaner state. If we don’t do this step now, when we reinstall, we will be told that the vCenter is already paired with another NSX controller. We will have the option to override that session during install. To be cleaner and make the reinstall easier, lets remove the Compute Manager.

Power down NSX VM and remove it.

Now that we are doing removing the configuration, we can shutdown and remove the NSX VM.