Network and security objects remain greyed out in Global Manager UI after deletion, NSX

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

In an NSX Federation environment, you observe the following symptoms:

• Deleted objects (such as Distributed Firewall rules or Logical Segments) persist in the Global Manager (GM) UI as greyed-out entries.
• The objects are successfully removed from the Local Managers (LM) but remain visible on the Global Manager.

Environment

VMware NSX

Cause

This issue is caused by a site configuration inconsistency on the Local Manager. Specifically, the LM may have a view where it identifies two Global Managers as "Active." When the legitimate Active GM sends a synchronization handshake, the LM rejects it because it does not match the first "Active" site in its internal list. This prevents the LM from sending the necessary delete notifications back to the GM to purge the DeletesPending table.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you must correct the site configuration on the Local Manager and trigger a manual synchronization.

1. Verify the conflict:
   Log in to the problematic Local Manager (LM) via SSH as root and run the following command to check the site configuration:
   curl -X GET -ik http://localhost:7999/api/v1/sites
   Confirm if the output incorrectly lists more than one site with "active_gm": "ACTIVE".

2. Re-onboard the LM site from the Active Global Manager using the following API (replace placeholders with your environment details):
   curl -X POST -ik http://localhost:7999/api/v1/sites?action=onboard_site -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"address": "####", "username": "####", "password": "####", "thumbprint": "####", "site_name": "####", "standby_gm":false}'

3. Trigger notification synchronization:
   Once the site configuration is in sync (showing one Active and one Standby GM), log in to a manager node on the LM and trigger a full notification sync to flush the stale entries:
   POST https://####/policy/api/v1/infra/full-sync-action?action=request_notifications_full_sync

4. Verification:
   Refresh the Global Manager UI. The greyed-out objects should no longer be visible.

Additional Information

VMware NSX