Cleanup Policy

spec.cleanupPolicy controls whether agent-forge-operator deletes external inventory when demand disappears or when a pool is deleted.

Delete

Delete is the default policy.

spec:
  cleanupPolicy: Delete

With Delete, the operator removes stale owned vSphere VMs and unbound Agents when they are no longer needed. Scale-down is conservative: the controller first observes a paired CAPI Machine entering deletion, waits until that Machine has disappeared, and only then deletes the paired VsphereAgent, VM, and stale Agent.

Retain

Use Retain when external cleanup should be handled manually.

spec:
  cleanupPolicy: Retain

With Retain, the operator still creates VMs and patches Agents for new demand, but it does not plan scale-down VM or Agent deletes. It also does not destroy vSphere VMs when a pool or VsphereAgent is deleted.

This is useful for conservative production rollouts where operators want to observe status and reconcile scale-up before allowing automatic cleanup.