Deletion of cluster in SDDC Manager has warning and results in stale or orphaned TZ and ESXi Transport Nodes in NSX

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• SDDC Manager is in use
• A cluster that is NSX-enabled is deleted from SDDC Manager
• The deletion of this cluster shows success with a warning
• The status of the Transport Zone used for this cluster shows "Unknown" in NSX
• Clicking on the "Unknown" status link shows that there are several ESXI host TNs in this Transport Zone that no longer exist in vCenter Server or SDDC

Environment

VMware NSX 4.2.1.0
VMware SDDC Manager

Cause

The cause of this issue is unknown.

Resolution

If there are stale ESXi transport nodes remaining in the NSX Manager, that are listed as members of a Transport Zone in "Unknown" status, first it's important to validate that these ESXi hosts no longer exist in vCenter Server or SDDC Manager. Do not continue with this resolution if the hosts exist in either of the two products.

If those ESXi hosts do not exist in vCenter Server or in SDDC Manager then follow these steps:
1. Copy each of those ESXi host names listed in the Transport Zone into a notepad
2. For each of these ESXi hosts, copy the name and search in the NSX elastic search (search button at the top of the NSX UI)
3. From the search results identify the UUID for each of these ESXi TNs and paste them into the notepad next to the hostname 

Once you have the UUID for each of those ESXi hosts, follow the steps in Option 3 under Resolution of this KB: 
Installing or Upgrading NSX on an ESXi host fails reporting the node already exists

Once all the stale ESXi hosts are cleaned up, the Transport Zone containing them will automatically disappear from the NSX UI (but in some case you may need to wait a few minutes for this to happen).