NSX-T owned Service Plane Forwarding port (SPF port) is deleted by vCenter when SI and / or GI is deployed
Affected ESXi versions 7.0 and above including U1, U2
Case: It happens with ESXi 7.0 and above with use of VDS7.0 in the NSX-T environment. When Service Insertion and / or Guest Introspection is deployed and not enabled within 24-hours, the SPF port would be deleted from the ESXi host. This will occur if these conditions are met.
As a part of the vCenter and ESX dvport sync workflow enacted every 24 hours, the dvports owned by NSX-T SPF port are unexpectedly removed from the NSX-T prepared Transport Node.
The ESXi host's root shell the command output of 'net-dvs -l' would not show SPF port present after 24 hours.
When SI/GI feature is enabled, the SPF port is created on the host. We can verify from nsxaVim.log, the SPF port was created:
2021-03-29T18:58:14Z nsxaVim: [2152094]: INFO Creating spf port
[uuid=spfPort503cf18f6cffc28f|switchUuid=50 3c f1 8f 6c ## ## ##-## ## ## 14 1e 8e c6
ed|spf=true|extraConfigs=com.vmware.port.extraConfig.vnic.external.id:spfVif1617044555]
2021-03-29T18:58:14Z nsxaVim: [2152094]: INFO Port operation add called with
uuid=spfPort503cf18f6cffc28f|switchUuid=50 3c f1 8f 6c ## ## ##-## ## ## 14 1e 8e c6
ed|spf=true|extraConfigs=com.vmware.port.extraConfig.vnic.external.id:spfVif1617044555
2021-03-29T18:58:14Z nsxaVim: [2152094]: INFO Sucessfully add dvport
[spfPort503cf18f6cffc28f]
The first time SPF tried to connect the port:
vmkernel.log:2021-04-01T00:30:10.289Z cpu20:3079963)WARNING: spf:
SPFPort_Connect:145: [nsx@6876 comp="nsx-esx"]Could not connect SPF port : Not found
2021-04-01T00:30:10.289Z cpu20:3079963)WARNING: spf: SPFPort_Connect:145: [nsx@6876 comp="nsx-esx"]Could not connect SPF port : Not found