If you are planning to upgrade to NSX 6.4.4, be sure to have a look at VMware KB 67416 before you do. I’ve seen several customers hit this issue now, and a bit of pre-work before the upgrade can save you a lot of grief.
It appears that if you are using grouping objects, like security groups or IP sets in your ESG firewall rules, there is a chance that your ESG will become unmanageable after NSX Manager gets upgraded to 6.4.4. Most customers will notice this issue when they go to upgrade their ESGs as part of the upgrade process and the tasks fail. In addition to not being able to upgrade the edge, all configuration changes you attempt to make will also fail.
This issue lies in the message bus communication channel between NSX Manager and the ESG. These security groups and IP sets trigger a large number of messages and eventually the channel becomes blocked as a result. Unfortunately, there is no workaround aside from removing these groups and IP sets from the firewall before upgrading. This may not be a feasible workaround for the majority of customers out there.
Although not a common configuration, this issue can also be triggered if DFW rules are applied to ESGs and these rules contain grouping objects.
If you know your environment is configured with security groups and IP sets in the edge firewall, I’d recommend reaching out to VMware technical support prior to beginning your upgrade. Support can proactively install a “hot patch” so that you won’t hit this problem. If you have already hit this, the same hot patch can be applied to get you back up and running. In order for the patch to work, the ESG would have to be re-deployed leading to a brief outage. Obviously getting in front of this issue is a better plan than being reactive.
VMware will be updating the 6.4.4 release notes to reflect this.
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