As an administrator, you can delete a virtual machine from Druva. You can delete a vCenter machine or an ESXi host only after 7 days of the deletion of the last configured virtual machine. When a VM is deleted, the virtual machine moves to an unconfigured state and is not displayed on the Configured VMs page. If you are a cloud administrator, you can delete any virtual machine. If you are a group administrator, you can delete a virtual machine that belongs to the server group that you manage.
You might want to delete virtual machines in the following scenarios:
You configured virtual machines during evaluation, and you now want to reclaim the storage consumed.
You are planning to deprecate virtual machines, and you no longer need to keep data.
You are planning to replace virtual machines, and a backup of the replacement virtual machines might consume additional storage for the same data.
You no longer want to backup a virtual machine.
You migrated a virtual machine to a different VMware ESXi or vCenter Server that is not configured for backup.
After you delete a virtual machine, Druva purges the backup data of that virtual machine. The time required for purging data after deleting a virtual machine depends on the size of data that was backed up. For large-sized datasets, Druva might take longer to complete a purge operation.
📝 Note
When a virtual machine configured for backup is deleted from the VMware environment, the first backup job after the virtual machine deletion fails. However, the virtual machine is disabled from backup to avoid subsequent job failures. The virtual machine disabled for backup will be still available for restore.
To delete a virtual machine
Log in to the Management Console.
From the top menu bar, select your organization if organizations are enabled.
Click Protect > VMware.
The vCenter/ESXi host page appears that lists all the registered vCenter/hypervisors.You can either select the registered vCenter/ESXi host from the card view or list view or select it from the vCenter/ESXi host list in the left navigation pane.
In the navigation pane, click Configured VMs.
Click on the virtual machine you want to delete.
Click the more options button and click Delete.
A confirmation dialog is displayed. Provide a reason in the Reason for deletion box and click Delete VM. The reason is required to confirm your action and to prevent any accidental deletion. This is a mandatory field, and you can use a minimum of 10 characters and a maximum of 150 characters to provide the reason for deletion. Note that all deletion requests with a reason will be reported to the Audit Trails.
For more information, see View Admin Audit Trails page.
💡 Tip
When you add a deleted virtual machine back, reconfigure it for backup. To know more details, see Manually configure virtual machines for backup.