Removing a Provisioned Switch from a Switch Stack

When a provisioned switch is removed from a switch stack, the member number must be manually changed back to 1 and the provision information must be removed from the switch. If you try to remove the provision information from the switch before the member number has been reset to 1, you may receive the following errors:

%Switch can not be un-provisioned when it is physically present
%IDBs can not be removed when switch is active

Back up the switch configuration before starting, renumbering and removing the provisioned information will destroy the current interface specific configuration of the switch.

To remove the switch from the stack, we first determine the member number of the switch.

switch# show switch

The switch will produce a table listing all of the stack members. In our example, we will assume that member 2 matched the MAC address from the switch that we want to remove from the stack. With the switch disconnected from the stack, issue the following command:

switch(config)# switch 2 renumber 1

This will renumber the switch to member number 1, but it does not remove the provisioned information (information about the stack) from the switch. To remove the provisioned information, issue the following command:

switch(config)# no switch 2 provision

When the switch is restarted it will come up as switch number 1 and the interfaces will be renumbered accordingly.