How to uninstall vCenter Server Agent from ESX/ESXi host

ESX

• SSH into the host
  • Stop the vCenter agent process.  –>service vmware-vpxa stop
    • This also sometimes completed right away, and other times, just took more time than it should have.
  • Stop the hostd process.  –> service mgmt-vmware stop
    • At this point, typically the host would finally disconnect from vCenter, if it hadn’t already completed the disconnect process issued earlier.
  • Delete the user account vCenter uses to communicate with the host.  –> userdel vpxuser
  • Find all of the vCenter and HA processes.  –> rpm -qa |grep -iE ‘vpx|aam’
  • Delete the RPM’s found earlier –> rpm -e
  • Start the hostd process. –> service mgmt-vware start
• Now that’s all done.  Go back into vCenter and reconnect the host.

ESXi

ESXi is a slightly different beast.  Since it doesn’t use a Red Hat based service console, there are no RPM’s to remove as was done above.  To remove the agents from ESXi:

• SSH into the host
  • Delete the user account vCenter uses to communicate with the host.  –> userdel vpxuser
  • Move into the uninstaller directory –> cd to /opt/vmware/uninstallers
  • Remove the HA/aam agent –> ./VMware-aam-ha-uninstall.sh to
  • Remove the vCenter agent –> ./VMware-vpxa-uninstall.sh to
• Now that’s all done.  Go back into vCenter and reconnect the host