As I continue my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.2 upgrade journey, I have now reached the core SDDC components, including vCenter, NSX, and ESX.
NSX Manager and NSX Edges was up first and before the upgrade begins, a pre-check is performed. I was not expecting any issues but to my surprise, I ran into the following validation error:
DNS is not configured on edge 83ea6662-41b2-48aa-a8d0-22039d3230c0. Edge will not be able to resolve the fqdn to download the upgrade bundle from NSX manager. Kindly configure a valid DNS on edge.. Other components that failed with the same error: edge01b, edge01a
We all know how important DNS is and ensuring it is configured correctly, both forward and reverse lookups.
However, I like to think that I am pretty good about ensuring everything in my lab is setup with DNS and this honestly was a surprising error, that BOTH NSX Edges do NOT have DNS configured!?! 🤔
I logged into one of my NSX Edges using the admin account and using the get name-servers and get search-domains commands, sure enough nothing was configured!
The fix was quite easy by using the set name-servers and set search-domains command and then quick ping for a known FQDN to ensure DNS lookup was successful.
After chatting with some folks internally, they too confirmed they have seen the same behavior as part of upgrade.
It turns out DNS configuration for NSX Edges is NOT a required input, at least when using the Simplified Edge Deployment within vCenter Server, which is exactly how I had deployed these Edges. At least, it was not user error 😅
I will file a product enhancement if one has not already been filed since DNS is indeed critical for NSX Edge during upgrade as they will need to fetch the bundle updates which will be pulling from an FQDN.
Thanks for the comment!