Prolonged disconnection of the NSX control plane could eventually affect the dataplane

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• NSX version NSX 4.2.x
• NSX Managers and Compute Managers (vCenters) are down. These Manager and VC VMs are deleted and removed from inventory due to a faulty automation task.
• No Backups available.
• These Manager and VC VMs are non-recoverable and non-restorable.
• The deleted nodes are in the process of being rebuilt manually.

Environment

• VMware NSX
• VMware vCenter Server

Resolution

The environment must be kept static while the NSX Managers are being rebuilt. This is crucial because a more static environment reduces the probability of datapath issues before the rebuild is complete .

Any vMotion, a new VM provision, or a VM power-on can affect the datapath on Transport nodes . If a Transport Node (Edge or ESXi) has no CCP channel left, that could result in datapath issues.

Although it is difficult to completely prevent central plane updates, which can be triggered even by MAC address queries, minimizing them is key .

An environment with NSX Manager disconnections for more than 8 to 16 hours becomes highly unpredictable, and uninterrupted traffic cannot be guaranteed beyond this period . Therefore, it is recommended to rebuild the Managers and VCs as soon as possible.