HA Pair "Deactivated" due to expired license after upgrading licenses.

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

HA shows the following errors:

License Key is inactve. HCX usage will be restricted. Update HCX system with a valid license key from HCX_Manager -> Configuration

As well as:

High Availability feature is deactivated NE appliances are not HA protected.

 

When you look at the history, it may show a recently expired HCX Enterprise core license.

If an upgrade is in process, you won't be able to continue until the licensing issue is addressed.

Environment

HCX 4.9.0

HCX 4.10.1

VCF

NSX Enterprise VCF Perpetual license.

Cause

New licenses may have been added. However, the new licenses manually deployed will not take effect until the original expired VCF deployed licenses are removed as VCF licenses take precedence over manually deployed ones.

Resolution

Remove the expired licenses and restart Web and Application Services.

Additional Information

During the upgrade a forced fail over occurs.

Force Failover of an HA Group

• This operation triggers a force failover i.e. the Standby appliances are forced to take over the Active role, and the originally Active appliances move into a Standby role

• This operation can be used for "maintenance" purpose

• This operation can be also be used to do a "test" or a "dry-run" of the HA capability

• The roles of the appliance pairs are actually changed in this operation

During the process one pair is upgraded at a time. A force failover occurs in the middle. After which HA is deactivated temporarily while the second pair is upgraded. This will cause the status to be unreadable on the HA pair, and will show "Undecided" on both pairs. However, the last "Active" pair after the failover  is still the active pair, just the status is not readable while HA is temporarily deactivated. The upgrade will continue, and after the initial upgrade on the second pair is complete, HA is re-activated, and the "Active" pair will show active. The "Stand-by" pair will show "undecided" until it finishes synchronizing it's data.

Information on the precedence of licenses.