NSX Global Manager upgrade pre-check fails with "Active Global Manager site cannot be upgraded first. Please upgrade Standby Global Manager '<Secondary Global Manager Site Name>' before performing upgrade of this site."

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• During the attempt to upgrade an Active NSX Global Manager site, the upgrade pre-checks report that a Standby Global Manager must be upgraded first.
• The error message will provide the Site Name of the Standby Global Manager to be upgraded.
• The site named is no longer available and may have been previously replaced.

Environment

VMware NSX

Cause

The site name is no longer available and may have already replaced by off-boarding this secondary Global Manager site and on-boarding a different secondary Global Manager. The Site Manager function of the Active Global Manager still retains a record of the off-boarded and defunct Global Manager.

To verify, run this API call from the Active Global Manager CLI as root:

curl -l -k -u '<username>' -H 'Content-Type:application/json' -X GET http://localhost:7441/api/v1/sites

A snippet of the returned data to show ONLY the stale secondary Global Manager:

"id": "########-####-####-####-############",
"is_federated": false,
"is_local": false,
"name": "<Secondary Global Manager Site Name>",
"node_type": "GM",   ←Be sure this node_type is GM and not LM.
"site_version": "<NSX Manager Version of Stale Global Manager>",
"system_id": 0,
"trust_manager_cert": "omitted"
},

Resolution

Execute the off-boarding API of the Standby Global Manager node using the following command from the Active Global Manager CLI as root:

curl -X POST -ik http://localhost:7441/api/v1/sites?action=offboard_remote \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"credential": {"ip": "", "port": 443, "username": "", "password": "", "thumbprint": ""}, "site_id": "#####################################"}'

Returned Output:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 0
Vmw-Task-Id: ########-####-####-####-############_########-####-####-####-############
Date: <Date of API call execution>

Upgrade pre-checks will now move past the stale Secondary Global Manager entry.

Additional Information

This issue is similar to and caused by the same conditions as Standby NSX Global manager showing mode "none" instead of "standby."