Deleting a user cluster

This page describes how to delete a GKE On-Prem user cluster.

Overview

GKE On-Prem supports deletion of healthy user clusters via gkectl. If the cluster is unhealthy (for example, if its control plane is unreachable or the cluster failed to bootstrap), refer instead to Manually deleting a user cluster.

Deleting a user cluster

Run the following command:

gkectl delete cluster \
--kubeconfig [ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] \
--cluster [CLUSTER_NAME]

where [ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] is the admin cluster's kubeconfig file, and [CLUSTER_NAME] is the name of the user cluster you want to delete.

After you have finished

After gkectl finishes deleting the user cluster, delete the user cluster kubeconfig.

Known Issues

An additional user control plane VM might be created in vSphere after the cluster is deleted. Verify that all user cluster VMs are deleted by performing the following steps:

  1. From the vSphere Web Client's left-hand Navigator menu, click the Hosts and Clusters menu.
  2. Find your Resource Pool.
  3. There should be no VMs that are prefixed with your user cluster's name.

If there are user cluster VMs remaining, perform the following steps from the vSphere Web Client:

  1. Right-click the user cluster VM and select Power > Power Off.
  2. Once the VM is powered off, right-click the VM and select Delete from Disk.

Troubleshooting

For more information, refer to Troubleshooting.

Diagnosing cluster issues using gkectl

Use gkectl diagnosecommands to identify cluster issues and share cluster information with Google. See Diagnosing cluster issues.

Default logging behavior

For gkectl and gkeadm it is sufficient to use the default logging settings:

  • By default, log entries are saved as follows:

    • For gkectl, the default log file is /home/ubuntu/.config/gke-on-prem/logs/gkectl-$(date).log, and the file is symlinked with the logs/gkectl-$(date).log file in the local directory where you run gkectl.
    • For gkeadm, the default log file is logs/gkeadm-$(date).log in the local directory where you run gkeadm.
  • All log entries are saved in the log file, even if they are not printed in the terminal (when --alsologtostderr is false).
  • The -v5 verbosity level (default) covers all the log entries needed by the support team.
  • The log file also contains the command executed and the failure message.

We recommend that you send the log file to the support team when you need help.

Specifying a non-default location for the log file

To specify a non-default location for the gkectl log file, use the --log_file flag. The log file that you specify will not be symlinked with the local directory.

To specify a non-default location for the gkeadm log file, use the --log_file flag.

Locating Cluster API logs in the admin cluster

If a VM fails to start after the admin control plane has started, you can try debugging this by inspecting the Cluster API controllers' logs in the admin cluster:

  1. Find the name of the Cluster API controllers Pod in the kube-system namespace, where [ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] is the path to the admin cluster's kubeconfig file:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] -n kube-system get pods | grep clusterapi-controllers

  2. Open the Pod's logs, where [POD_NAME] is the name of the Pod. Optionally, use grep or a similar tool to search for errors:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] -n kube-system logs [POD_NAME] vsphere-controller-manager