NSX Edge Upgrade Warning: "The tunnels on the Edge are not available"

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

When attempting to upgrade NSX Edge nodes, the upgrade pre-checks or status monitoring may halt or flag the process with the following system warning:

"The tunnels on the Edge are not available."

Environment

• VMware NSX 4.x

Cause

This warning is flagged and expected if the affected Edge nodes do not have any logical routers (Tier-0 or Tier-1 gateways) currently attached or configured.

Tunnels are only established when logical routing services require them. Because no Tier-0 or Tier-1 gateways are attached to these specific Edge nodes, the system has no configuration instructing it to build tunnels. Therefore, the absence of tunnels is the expected and normal operational behavior for an Edge node in this specific configuration.

Resolution

Verify whether any Tier-0 or Tier-1 gateways are configured on this Edge node. If none exist, no corrective action is required.

This warning can be safely acknowledged and ignored for any Edge nodes that are not actively participating in logical routing. Bypassing or acknowledging the warning allows the upgrade process to proceed without artificially failing an Edge node that is operating exactly as designed.

However, if there are Tier-0 or Tier-1 gateways configured to this specific Edge node, and still the warning "The tunnels on the Edge are not available" is seen, then proceed with troubleshooting BFD tunnels following the below KB:

Troubleshooting NSX TEP/BFD Tunnels between ESXi hosts and Edges