FIX: VMware Cloud Foundation Add Host and Cluster Failed
The Issue?: Can’t Add Hosts or Clusters to VCF Domains
You’ve done everything right; built resilient data centers using VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Regions, patched both data centers, enabled NSX Federation, and everything is humming along.
Next you need to add / replace an existing host in one of the domains or add a whole new cluster. Typically this is a simple operation, however, you start the process and hit the issue shown in the screenshot below.
The Issue?
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) introduced NSX Policy API in version 5.1, as part of this shift, certain domain operations use the latest policy API. The issue encountered here (from my testing) was specifically to do with VCF environments that had been federated using NSX Federation. Upon checking the environment, everything else was healthy, passwords were up to date, so there was nothing at surface level that could have been causing the issue.
The Fix!
First up, SSH to SDDC manager, then SU to root, once done, edit the ‘application-prod.properties’ file using VI or your preferred text editor.
Add the following line to the bottom of the file;
nsxt.base.version.policy=4.2.0.0.0-0
Restart the domain manager service and ensure it is up and running again;
systemctl restart domainmanager
Retry the workflow to add the host or cluster to the domain.
As you can see below, the add new host workflow has now completed successfully, you can comment out the changes you made or leave it there until all your domain add operations are complete. It will not hinder any upgrades in the future.
All this change is doing, is making SDDC Manager use older API’s that have been deprecated, however, are still functional.
You can check out some of my other VCF related articles here and my YouTube channel below.
