VMware NSX Environment Shutdown and Startup

For all of us home_lab_fanatics =) we do not keep our equipment running unless we’re testing something or working on something and you don’t want to waist much time on the shutdown/startup process.

NSX is now a permanent part of my nested homelab and I need to get the networking up before delving into other stuff, so when powering on the nested environment I have been noticing an issue with my ESXi hosts where when I hit the installation menu in the Networking and Security menu I need to resolve the issue with both of my clusters and when I hit resolve all hosts start getting the agent reinstalled/reconfigured and afterwards everything is normal.

Now, I did know that there is an issue with the shutdown/startup sequence. I had followed this KB but the issue still persisted, after a couple of trials on I got things to work with a 100% healthy status.

The main issue is in the first two lines of the KB and I quote:

• Power on vCenter Server and the ESXi hosts and ensure that the initialization completes.
• Power on NSX Manager and ensure all NSX services are up. For example, ensure that NSX Manager has connected to the lookup service.

My current setup is:

1. Two sites.
2. First site:
   1. Compute and Edge Cluster
   2. Controller’s Cluster
3. Second site:
   1. Compute and Edge Cluster
4. Management components are running directly on the physical hosts.

My working startup/shutdown process is as follows:

1. Power on PSC Servers.
2. Power on vCenter Servers.
3. Power on the NSX Managers.
4. Power on all ESXi hosts.

When powering on the ESXi hosts prior to the NSX managers I am always getting the host agent issue (a side note, I am currently on vSphere 6.5 and NSX 6.3.1).

If anyone has tested this on physical NSX enabled clusters (including collapsed clusters as well) I would be glad to update this post with your findings.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

(Abdullah)^2