This was a very bizarre situation with one of the vCenter Servers which configured with the VCHA (VMware vCenter High Availability Feature) and this VCHA Enabled vCenter Suddenly Disconnected from the network while we were deploying the vRealize Network Insight Proxy in our environment.
There is a previous post with regard to deploying the VCHA in a single or two ESXi hosts which violates the minimum requirements of the VCHA ,you can find the post here, and VCHA Basic configuration can be found in here.
I can guarantee that we haven’t done any changes while we were doing this deployment and suddenly, the connectivity to the vCenter Server lost and the deployment had to stop. Initially, the thoughts were driven towards an IP conflict at the deployment stage but, after re-checking the configurations of the vRNI manager and the proxy we confirmed that there was no a mistake done by the engineers.
Then the troubleshooting was started and it was noted that the network of the Appliances (in all three nodes in the VCHA Cluster) were having some issues with the bringing up the network.
“systemctl status network.service” command output was something similar to this.
Even network interface was not detecting to the Operating System, output of the “ifconfig” command
Destroy VCHA Cluster Configuration
To find a solution for this situation we had to to destroy the VCHA Cluster configuration.
“destroy-vcha” command was issued in the console and it requested to force the command with “-f” flag to destroy the configuration. Please note that “Primary” node should be used to destroy the configuration.
The vCenter server connectivity appeared to be restored after completing the command, and checked the network interfaces again to confirm the connectivity.
Output of the “ifconfig” command displayed the primary network interface
This seems to be a bug in this configuration, and something that worth of paying more attention to fine tune by VMware.
There are several environments in place with this VCHA enabled vCenter Server Clusters and I will post if there are any reported incidents similar to this in my blog.
Article Short Link: https://tcrum.net/destroyVCHA
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