When CM is set to managing services, its central source of configs lie within the DB. For every time a role instance is spawned, the config is generated into a special (non-/etc/…) path and the service is started with the special config dir. You could do an ls -l /var/run/cloudera-scm-agent/process on any host to see this, for example (the same files are available in the UI under any instance's Processes tab). So even if you remove the packages, CM faces no impact since it still has the Parcel location now for the actual binaries, and the configs are within its DB, away from being affected by RPM removals. source: https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Cloudera-Manager-Installation/Package-installs-detected-on-host-with-parcel/td-p/32442 ... View more