Loss of TOR bridged networking in a Cross vCenter environment

Products

• VMware NSX for vSphere

Issue/Introduction

In a Cross vCenter NSX environment, with a hardware VTEP deployed on the Primary site, there is a network outage for TOR bridged traffic when the Secondary NSX Manager restarts.

Environment

• VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3.x
• VMware NSX for vSphere 6.2.x

Cause

There is a documented limitation when using HW-VTEP in a cross vCenter environment

 "In a cross-vCenter NSX environment, hardware gateway switch configurations are only supported on the primary NSX Manager.  Hardware gateway switches must be bound to non-universal logical switches. Hardware gateway configurations are not supported on secondary NSX Managers."

If a full sync is triggered on the Secondary NSX Manager, since it has no TOR configuration, it removes the TOR configuration on the Controller.
This results in a data plane outage for the TOR bridged traffic.

A full sync may be triggered if the Secondary NSX Manager restarts or if there is a disconnect/reconnect between the Controllers and Secondary NSX Manager.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in:

• VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3.6.
• VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4.1.

Workaround:

1. On the vSphere Web Client, navigate to Networking & Security > Installation > Management.
2. Select the Primary NSX Manager in the NSX Manager drop-down menu.
3. From the Actions cog wheel, select Update controller state. This will resynchronize the NSX Controllers and restore the TOR bridged data plane.