Application pods in Down/Init state

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• The application pods may get stuck in an Init state with the below error message:
  
  Failed to create pod network sandbox k8s_xxxx-xxxx-osd-xx-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx-openshift-storage_xxxxxx-xxx-xxx-xxxxxxxx(uuid): error adding pod openshift-storage__xxxx-xxxx-osd-xx-xxxxxxx-xxxxxxx to CNI network "multus-cni-network": plugin type="multus-shim" name="multus-cni-network" failed (add): CmdAdd (shim): CNI request failed with status 400:"


• In the NCP node agent logs, the below error can be observed:
  
  2025-08-11T14:18:39.180Z worker0.xxxxx.xx.xxxx NSX 8 - [nsx@6876 comp="nsx-container-ncp" subcomp="ncp" level="WARNING"] vmware_nsxlib.v3.client The HTTP request returned error code 400, whereas 201/200 response codes were expected. Response body {'httpStatus': 'BAD_REQUEST', 'error_code': 500078, 'module_name': 'Policy', 'error_message': 'In the /infra/segments/seg_xxxx-xxxx-xxxx_1/ports/port_xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxx : tags, field 30 count exceeds max number allowed 29.'}

Environment

VMware NSX

Cause

NSX supports max 29 tags. Over the limit, logical switch port will not get created and thus, would result in the pods to stuck in the Initialization state.
this is also applicable for the OpenShift cluster pods.

Resolution

K8s section with "label_filtering_regex_list" can be added to the ncp.ini to reduce the filter:

Creating and Managing Network Profiles

For Openshift, for the change to be persistent, it must be added to nsx-ncp-operator-config.

NOTE: adding "label_filtering_regex_list = .*", will drop the label > tag translation. The side effect of this change is that users will not be able to enforce NSX security policies based on K8s labels. K8s network policies may be impacted as well.

Additional Information

NSX enforces a limit of 29 tags for each resource. NCP maps each pod's label to an NSX tag. K8s labels are used to enforce security policies.