Best Practice for Managing NSX Manager Uptime and Rolling Reboot

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• This article provides best practices for managing NSX Manager uptime and outlines the risks of neglecting regular maintenance reboots.
• This outlines the "ideal" time to reboot or the potential infrastructure impact of allowing managers to run indefinitely.

Environment

VMware NSX 

Resolution

While NSX does not enforce a hard-coded "maximum uptime" policy, failing to reboot the management appliances periodically can lead below issues

• Upgrade Recommendations:
  Attempting to upgrade a system with extreme uptime significantly increases the risk of the upgrade failing due to stale processes or inconsistent service states.
  In environments with long uptimes, especially if an upgrade has not been performed in a long time, it can be beneficial to perform a proactive reboot of all appliances prior to starting the upgrade.
  Reference : KB 367640

• SNMPv3 Failures:
  Systems exceeding 1,500 days of uptime are known to experience service failures, specifically within the SNMPv3 module.
  Reference : KB392941

Rolling Reboot Procedure
If you need to reboot multiple NSX Managers, you must reboot them one at a time. Wait for the rebooted NSX Manager to be online before rebooting another.

Verify Cluster Health

Before and after each reboot, check the overall status of the management cluster.

NSXmanager>get cluster status

• What to look for: Ensure the Status is STABLE.

Official Guide: Reboot an NSX Manager - Broadcom TechDocs

Additional Information

It is recommended to regularly upgrade the NSX to the latest version to benefit from new features, security patches, and improved stability, as VMware regularly releases updates.