vMotion of NSX EDGE gotcha

Hi,

Recently I was working on a brown field deployment of NSX and ran into an issue where we were not able to connect to the DHCP server from a Logical Switch (which means the VMs are not getting IP addresses from DHCP server) which was a key.

If we put the VM on a regular VDS dvportgroup it gets the DHCP IP correctly.

So we started looking in to the issue further and engage VMware GSS to look in to the issue.

During the troubleshooting we had to decide the location of Edge and try moving it to a different host to verify if its not hitting any uplink issue.

As we were using vCenter Web Client and as soon as we tried migrating (vMotion) it to another host and we were prompted with the NIC mapping page. Where we need to map each interface exists on the NSX Edge to a corresponding portgroup or dvportgroup. Now we have only limited number of portgroups/dvportgroups existed on the Cluster and we could not map all the internal interfaces (which gets created by default on the Edge appliance).

The source were listed as "None" so not sure where to map them.

So we ended up using the vSphere client to migrate the Edge appliance, and boom....it got migrated with no notification about mapping all the interfaces. Just select the destination ESXi host and hit "Finish", and we are done.

We were then moved into the next phase of troubleshooting but the above just put me in a dilemma that the behaviour of Web Client is a bug or is it by design.

Interested in getting the answer from VMware so that I can clarify that with the existing and future customers on why to use vSphere client and what is the alternate methods to use when the Fat/Thick client will completely got removed by VMware??

Please leave the comment and share this.

Thanks for your time.