I know that NSX-v 6.2 just hit, but I already saw a few instances when somebody installing NSX in multi-VC environment deploys first NSX Manager appliance from OVF, and then proceeds to clone fully deployed appliance for Secondary instances.
The problem with this approach is that UUID for NSX Manager is generated at the time of OVF deployment, which means all copies of NSX Manager created in the fashion above may have the same UUID.
This fact will come to bite when it’s time to join Secondary NSX Managers to the Primary – your Secondary NSX Managers will fail to import the Controller cluster. It is because at the time of import, NSX Manager checks UUID of the NSX Manager that deployed Controllers, sees its own UUID, but then fails to find any records of these Controllers in its own database (duh).
You can check whether your Secondary NSX Manager has successfully imported your Controllers by connecting to that NSX Manager’s VM via SSH, and running the following CLI command:
show controller list all
P.S. I hope you did read the NSX Installation Guide, and found this post completely redundant. 😉 What I’ve just talked about is covered in the 4th paragraph right here.
Update: post updated with clarification that cloning process may result in duplicate UUID, not necessarily will. One case when it will is when NSX Manager VM is cloned in vCloud Director that does not have CloneBiosUuidOnVmCopy set to false. Big “Thank You” and full credit for this clarification goes to @rbudavari.
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