Kafka Controllers not starting after Helm Chart Update from 32.3.9 to 33.2.8 and raised Exception.

Products

• Bitnami Premium (Bitnami Secure Images)

Issue/Introduction

Kafka controllers not starting after helm chart update from 32.3.9 to 33.2.8 ( kafka:4.0.0-debian-12-r8 --> kafka:4.1.1-debian-12-r2) the controller-kafka-container crashes and restarts.

The helm chart is configured with kraftVersion: 0 therefore controller-static-quorum.

 

Cause

When checking the controller debug message it raises exception stating, You cannot specify controller.quorum.voters and format the node with --initial-controllers or --standalone. If you want to use dynamic quorum, please remove controller.quorum.voters and specify controller.quorum.bootstrap.servers instead. 

-------------------------
kafka 09:54:12.08 INFO  ==> 
kafka 09:54:12.08 INFO  ==> Welcome to the Bitnami kafka container
kafka 09:54:12.09 INFO  ==> Subscribe to project updates by watching https://github.com/bitnami/containers
kafka 09:54:12.09 INFO  ==> NOTICE: Starting August 28th, 2025, only a limited subset of images/charts will remain available for free. Backup will be available for some time at the 'Bitnami Legacy' repository. More info at https://github.com/bitnami/containers/issues/83267
kafka 09:54:12.09 INFO  ==> 
kafka 09:54:12.09 INFO  ==> ** Starting Kafka setup **
kafka 09:54:16.58 INFO  ==> Initializing KRaft storage metadata
kafka 09:54:18.05 INFO  ==> Formatting storage directories to add metadata...
Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: 
You cannot specify controller.quorum.voters and format the node with --initial-controllers or --standalone. If you want to use dynamic quorum, please remove controller.quorum.voters and specify controller.quorum.bootstrap.servers instead.

Resolution

The initialization script is updated to support this, Fix will be available in the new version of Kafka 33.2.13 which includes kafka:4.1.1-debian-12-r4. 

So kindly update to Kafka 33.2.13.