This is a clone of issue OCPBUGS-45998. The following is the description of the original issue:
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This is a clone of issue OCPBUGS-42414. The following is the description of the original issue:
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This is a clone of issue OCPBUGS-42388. The following is the description of the original issue:
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Description of problem:

Customer MachineSets are configured with deletePolicy: Oldest, and they annotated a specific machine with machine.openshift.io/cluster-api-delete-machine="true" to target it for deletion during a scale-down.

However, instead of deleting the annotated machine, another machine (based on the Oldest policy) was selected for deletion.

Interestingly, when they removed the deletePolicy: Oldest from the MachineSet (which defaulted to deletePolicy: Random), the annotation was correctly honored, and the specific machine  targeted was deleted during the scale-down operation.

Based on the documentation [1] , the annotation should override the deletePolicy, but this doesn’t seem to be happening when deletePolicy: Oldest is in place. The issue was resolved only when they removed the Oldest policy and allowed it to default to Random.
[1]. https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.14/machine_management/manually-scaling-machineset.html#machineset-delete-policy_manually-scaling-machineset

OCP 4.14.33.

How reproducible:

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Actual results:

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Additional info: