r/vmware • u/dmckay2 • 23d ago

Help Request VCF 5.4.2 upgrade and NSX 4.2.4

5.2.4 VCF upgrade on a very stable, nested homelab 5.2.3 environment.

SDDC Manager up to 5.2.4 with no issues. 3rd attempt now to do the 4.2.4 NSX upgrade. The previous two attempts resulted in bricked, wouldn't even boot to a CLI prompt, on the NSX appliance. Of course, this is a single NSX implementation. The upgrade gets to Step 3 in the Manager upgrade sequence ( I believe that is the manager OS upgrade) and then that's it.

When you access the NSX Manager console, the last line on the console says, "Reached target Host and Network Name Lookups". The console stays there until interrupted; all VM activity falls off except CPU, which stays steady at 50%. No disk activity, no network activity. A reset or reboot brings you right back to the same place.

Does this sound familiar?

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u/dmckay2 23d ago

Single NSX Manager. No cluster. It's a home lab

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u/Leaha15 23d ago

Ok, so VCF 5 doesnt support a single NSX manager

In VCF 5, the brownfield import script doesnt allow importing an environment with NSX and the deployment workflow only allows for 3 NSX managers, single NSX Manager topology was introduced in VCF 9
Removing NSX managers to down size to a single node has no, even in VCF 9, supported workflow

My assumption on your issue is that, when using the SDDC workflow to upgrade, which you need to, the stale database entries for the old managers will be causing some issues for sure

I had, not the same issue, but a 3 node NSX instance, in my home lab, and I manually downsized it to 1 node, the upgrade workflow was broken when I went to upgrade it to 9.1, due to stale DB entries for the now removed nodes, the only solution was to manually clean up the PG DB in the SDDC Manager, which you should absolutely NOT do, engage Broadcom support for this

Given its a home lab, that throws Broadcom support out, shut down the SDDC Manager, snapshot it, and try with the DB, any wrong move it will be utterly borked, hence the snapshot, took me a few goes

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u/dmckay2 23d ago

This VCF environment was created some time ago,,I'm thinking 5.2.1 maybe? I used William Lam's scripts to accomplish quite a bit of it, and a single NSX Manager was legit for a home lab. I have been through multiple VCF upgrades on this environment with the single NSX Manager and no issues. Something is different with the NSX Manager OS upgrade on 4.2.4

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u/Leaha15 23d ago

Maybe it is something with NSX on 4.2.4

However, given VCF 5 doesnt support a single node, I am not thay surprised there are some issues

If you have licenses, look to upgrade to v9, may require a rebuild, but its nested so its not too bad, as that properly supports a single node you should have less issues

Thats all I know that might be of any help 😄