SDDC upgrade to 5.2 triggers alarm "Verify Standalone Host Topology"

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager

Issue/Introduction

Upgrading to SDDC 5.2, where a VSAN witness host is present, can trigger the follow warning - "Verify Standalone Host Topology", To include HCX standalone hosts in a vCenter.

Environment

Any SDDC environment where VSAN witness nodes and HCX ESXi hosts are in use, and that is upgrading to 5.2.

Cause

This guardrail/ pre-check has been added to 5.2 

We can see the reference in operationsmanager.log
The standalone-host-ts check in vcenter, is failing at it's detecting vsan-witness host as standalone host. 

The process also detects standalone ESXi hosts that are in the environment for HCX functionality, and for that scenario this error is ignorable as well.


# grep -i "Entity resource state validation with resource state definition id standalone-host for" operationsmanager.log
<date and time> DEBUG [vcf_om,66a9fec43ff6a6e0dfbee300c08fd0b1,2c80] [c.v.e.s.c.v.util.ResponseUtil,pool-3-thread-7] Build validation response: {"errorCode":"BASELINER_ENTITY_RESOURCE_STATE_VALIDATION.info","arguments":["standalone-host","<witness_Node_FQDN>","standAloneHost"],"context":{"severity":"INFO","validation.taskId":"<Unique_identiffier>"},"message":"Entity resource state validation with resource state definition id standalone-host for entity <witness_Node_FQDN> of type standAloneHost succeeded"}


The guardrail/ pre-check, was introduced for Brownfield ingestion - e.g. SDDC doesn't support standalone hosts.  

Resolution

VMware by Broadcom Engineering has acknowledged the error, and are working on remediating this false positive error

The Standalone Host pre-check error can be ignored, as it's not going to block vCenter upgrade.
Customers can perform vCenter upgrade by ignoring the error. 

The precheck in upgrade only scenarios can be ignored.
The precheck should not be ignored when "ingesting" a new VCenter in SDDC.