A host in a vSphere environment needs to be taken offline for hardware maintenance.

Using vMotion to migrate all virtual machines off the host ensures that there is no downtime for the VMs during the maintenance process.

The administrator should then select the host and initiate maintenance mode from the vSphere Client to begin the maintenance process.

Ensuring the host is not part of a vSphere HA cluster before maintenance is important to avoid triggering unnecessary VM restarts or failovers during the process.