Which action should the administrator take before physically removing a blade server for maintenance or replacement?

A forced shutdown abruptly cuts power to the server but does not update UCS Manager inventory, so faults and rediscovery attempts will occur once the blade is removed.

Disassociating a service profile removes the workload configuration from the server but leaves the server object in UCS Manager inventory, which will fault when the hardware is absent.

Decommissioning tells Cisco UCS Manager to remove the server from active inventory, disassociate any linked service profile, and mark the chassis slot as intentionally empty. Without this step, UCS Manager will generate continuous faults and attempt repeated rediscovery after the blade is physically removed. Cisco's documented pre-removal procedure explicitly lists decommissioning as the required action to maintain clean domain state.

A graceful shutdown shuts down the operating system cleanly but does not signal UCS Manager that the physical server will be extracted from the chassis.