Welcome to the eighth installment of my NSX troubleshooting series. What I hope to do in these posts is share some of the common issues I run across from day to day. Each scenario will be a two-part post. The first will be an outline of the symptoms and problem statement along with bits of information from the environment. The second will be the solution, including the troubleshooting and investigation I did to get there.
The Scenario
As always, we’ll start with a brief problem statement:
“I’m doing a new greenfield deployment of NSX and my control cluster is failing to deploy. It seems stuck at ‘Deploying’ and then after a long period of time, it gives me a failure and the appliance gets deleted.”
Let’s have a look and see what this fictional administrator is seeing:
We can see that they’ve successfully deployed NSX Manager at version 6.3.2 and have no controllers successfully deployed yet.
A valid looking IP pool has been created for the controllers with all the pertinent IP settings populated. The controller deployment is being done with the following settings:
This seems to go normally for a period of time. We can see the appliance deployed and then powered up.
I was able to confirm that the appliance powered up without incident and the console was just sitting at the login prompt:
Despite looking ready to go, the ‘Deploying’ status continues to spin in the Web Client. After what felt like an eternity, the process fails and the appliance is shut down and deleted:
What’s Next?
What could be missing here? What is required for a control cluster node to be deployed successfully? Think of the steps it would need to perform. What should be happening after the controller node has powered up?
The solution is now live! You can find it here.
How would you handle this scenario? Let me know! Please feel free to leave a comment below or via Twitter (@vswitchzero).
vswitchzero 
Great content for a novice like me.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge throughout this series Mike. Appreciated.