I ended the process.... but I think there must be a global revision in the architecture.... tooo intricate and definitely not consumer ready This is what I did: -1. in my environment I have pacemaker cluster between nodes (as to overcome gluster I tried to implement also an ha nfs, and one node is my "software and helping repository" (of course using vdo to compress and deduplicate) so it have a cluster of 3 SATA 10TB disk to have some "space" published with linux iSCSI, all mapped on the management 10Gb/s interface (also the VMs vlan are on the same phisical interface, and also the iSCSI initiator for an external storage, so, as every node have to have its address the "datacenter" complain about the fact that the network isn't synced... (!) ) 0. a subset of the virtual machine moved to a node that would become -temporarly- an orphan of the old cluster 1. put the cluster is in global maintenance and hosted-engine stopped 2. on the node (free of VMs) where I would like to deploy the new engine I issued: ovirt-hosted-engine-cleanup (as stated in https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6529691) and verified that the "sanlock client status" left the storages unlocked 3. Deployied the new hosted-engine (hosted-engine --deploy) with time consuming on the new nfs external storage 4. logged in the new engine and defined manually all the networks 5. on the other nodes, stopped the virtual machines and unlocked the sanlock domains and manually umount all the mounted things on /rhev/.* (to stop machines virsh is you friend) virsh -c qemu:///system?authfile=/etc/ovirt-hosted-engine/virsh_auth.conf to check what storage is belonging to what VMs, the commands are: list - to see what VMs is on or paused domblklist --domain <name> - to see in what place in the local filesystem is mapped to the virtual qemu disks shutdown <name> --mode acpi - to stop gracefully th VM destroy <name> - to stop forcefully the "hanged" (!) VM 6. on every survived orphan node you have to unlock the domain you want to import (sanlock command is your friend but I didn't found the command to unlock only one storage at a time so I have simply stopped the daemon "sanlock client shutdown -f 1") and then umount the mountpoint "umount /rhev/[....]" 7. that is the "magic": on the new engine under StorageDomain>Storage you can select "import domain" and define the domain you want to import, oVirt recognize the domain as initialized domain and warning you that you can loose data... finger cross, acnolewdge an go on 8. selecting the domain you find new "tabs": "{VM|Template|Disk} Import" under, you can import the object follow instructions from oVirt and addressing network warnings (probably the MAC address of the old VMs are OUT the new ionterval. Hint and things: So your -basic- cluster will be up and running again. Obviously I didn't address the restore of other elements of oVirt environment.. probably someone can write a script that starting from a backup of the engine you can selectively restore the object (without ansible please) VM with pending snapshot are probably not imported and you have to "commit" the disk under the domain object "qemu-img commit <file of the snapshot>" and then you can select "scan disks" under storage domain page and then continue the import this method give "a sort of" control while the method -that should work under normal circumstances- give you only frustration and offline of the services. Hope this note is useful to someone and would be welcomed by the developers that try to make things consistent. Thank you for your work. Diego