I'm reaching out to fellow sysadmins to get some insights on how you handle decommissioned servers in vCenter. Over the years, we've acquired several companies and migrated their production VMs into our setup. Now, we've decommissioned their old servers but kept them in a folder in vCenter, powered off. The idea is to retain them in case we need to boot them up for any data recovery.
I'm curious about how others manage similar situations. Do you keep those old servers in your VM management software, ready for potential use, or do you let your backup system archive them and remove them from your inventory altogether?
2 Answers
A lot of us repurpose them for development or sandbox environments instead of just letting them sit. They can be useful for lab testing or other projects.
I usually keep them around but mark them as 'do not power on' for a set period. Once that time is up, I just delete them. If I need anything, I just restore it from the backup archive.
Yeah, but remember, these are VMs, not physical boxes. We brought them into vCenter when we decommissioned them.