Removal of relationships for stale CIsDescription Discovery by defult doesn't remove relationship for stale VM instance showing registered on relationship with retired ESX server. There might be such relationship for other stale CIs as well. These relationship will continue to exist in the CMDB and won't be removed on subsequent discovery runs. For customers who wish to removem them, they should use CMDB remediation rules to remove the relationships for stale CIs.https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-management/task/t_CreateCMDBRemediationRule.html In ServiceNow we preserve the relationship for retired CIs and we don't delete them as this is feature that we provide and this is as per design.