Recover HCX Network Extension (NE) VMs on a Disconnected ESXi Host from vCenter

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

• HCX Network Extension (NE) appliances are residing on an ESXi host that is currently disconnected from vCenter Server.
• Reconnecting the host back to vCenter may fail due to host-specific issues.
• In such cases, the NE appliances on the disconnected host remain up and running and are still reachable from the HCX Manager.

 

Environment

VMware HCX 

Resolution

If you believe you have encountered this issue, please open a support case with Broadcom Support (ESXi) and refer to this KB article.
For more information, see Creating and managing Broadcom support cases.

Workaround:

1. Perform a Manual Failover, for more information: Managing Network Extension High Availability
   Note: The HA Active role transitions to the Standby Network Extension appliance in the HA Group. Network extensions are unprotected during the operation. This operation needs to be performed during a maintenance window, as this can cause a brief outage during this task.
2. To validate if NE appliance has moved to Standby role, validate it from HCX Manager CLI:
   1. ccli
   2. list
   3. go # (where # is the NE appliance ID)
   4. show ha status
3. Once you confirm that the NE standby appliance is running on the affected ESXi node, you can proceed with rebooting the ESXi node.