HA (FDM) installation fails on ESXi 8.x hosts due to stale NSX VIBs

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

After patching or upgrading vCenter, users may find that High Availability (HA) cannot be enabled on ESXi hosts. The FDM (Fault Domain Manager) agent fails to install. This typically occurs when a host still contains NSX VIBs from a previous version (such as NSX 3.2) that are incompatible with ESXi 8.x.

• • In the /var/log/esxupdate.log on the host  you see entries similar to:
    esximage.Errors.DependencyError: On platform embeddedEsx, VIB VMware_bootbank_nsx-esx-datapath_3.2.2.0.0-7.0.20737187 requires esx-base << 7.1, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile.

Environment

vCenter Server
ESXi
NSX

Cause

This issue occurs due to NSX VIBs installed on the host which are not compatible with the version ESXi is currently running.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you must remove the stale VIBs to allow the HA agent installation to proceed.

Please follow the steps outlined in the KB article below to fix the issue.
Attempting to uninstall NSX VIBS from an ESX host while they are still in use causes network connectivity issues.

 

 

 

Additional Information

If the manual removal does not resolve the conflict, the preferred best practice is to reimage the host to ensure all stale NSX configuration files and VIBs are completely purged.