vSphere Storage Appliance cleanup.bat

I have been doing some home lab work with the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA). I have had a few request recently from customers with very small environments looking to leverage virtualization and a couple of large environments looking for solutions for branch offices.

I have been doing a lot of testing which included destroying and rebuilding the environment (multiple times). I just want to be familiar with how failures are handled and more importantly to recover from a failure. This is pretty well covered in the vSphere Storage Appliance Installation and Configuration Documentation.

One thing that was helpful in the lab environment was the section on “Deleting a VSA Cluster”

There is a script called cleanup.bat on the VSA Manager Server, in the case of my lab this is installed on the vCenter Server, located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\VSAManager\WEB-INF\test\tool\. To completely delete a VSA Cluster simply run this script passing your vCenter Administrator username, password, and Datacenter the VSA Cluster is configured on as parameters.

cleanup.bat vi-admin@lab.local MySuperSecretPassword LabDC

Not only does this delete the VSA Cluster, it also destroys all data in the VSA Cluster associated with the Datacenter LabDC – so be careful!!!

Just a note that I tried this several times without success. I found that the cleanup.bat script had to be run from an elevated (Run as Administrator) command prompt for it to work.

As the document says once the cleanup.bat completes you will need to restart the VMware Virtual Center Management Webservices.

I know the VSA is marketed for the SMB and I can see where that would be a good use case for it but I think for use in a branch office, where it is managed by a vCenter in an HQ, is really the where the VSA can shine.

Curious if anyone has deployed the VMware vSphere VSA in a production environment? Interested in hearing your thoughts or comments.