Successfully delete a Nutanix Container

I received two questions on the same topic last week so i figure i’ll put together a blog post.
The subject was “Cannot delete a Nutanix Container for my vSphere environment” !!

A Nutanix Container is the logical unit, created from the Nutanix Storage Pool, where you store your virtual machines (VMs) and or files. A Nutanix Container is the unit presented as a NFS datastore in the vSphere environment.

The standard procedure for deleting a Nutanix Container is:

• Remove all VMs and files from the Nutanix Container via the vSphere layer.
• Unmount the Nutanix Container from the ESXi hosts where it is mounted using the Nutanix Prism Interface (UI).
  • Prism -> Storage -> Table -> Mark the Nutanix Container -> Click Update
    
  • Select “Unmount on all hosts” -> Click Save -> Click Yes
    
    
• Delete the Nutanix Container via the Nutanix Prism Interface.
  • Prism -> Storage -> Table -> Mark the Nutanix Container -> Click Delete -> Click Yes
    
    

So what can possible go wrong:) ??

Well, the last step failed with the error “Container ctr75-compression2 contains VDisk(s) NFS:111 not marked for removal”

A Nutanix VDisk is ANY file on the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) with a size larger than 512 KB meaning not only VM related files.

So now we have to:

• Mount the Nutanix Container to the ESXi hosts again.
  • Prism -> Storage -> Table -> Mark the Nutanix Container -> Click Update
    
  • Select “Mount on all hosts” -> Click Save
    
• Log in to the vSphere client and verify if there are any files on the datastore. As you can see in the below print screen the NFS datastore doesn’t contain any VMs but it still contains VDisks since the vSphere-HA directory exists on the NFS Datastore.
  
• Remove the vSphere HA related files.
  

When done, follow the unmount and delete steps outlined earlier in the blog post and you can successfully remove the Nutanix Container.

The main take away from this blog post is to keep in mind that you need to remove all files from the NFS Datastore/Nutanix Container including VM files, ISO files and other potential files e.g. vSphere HA once before you can successfully delete the Nutanix Container.