In doing some testing around NSX Edge deployment scenarios I came across a small quirk in the High Availability Config for the NSX Edge Gateway where by after configuring HA from either the Web Client of through the Rest API you will see the High Availability Status as Down in the Web Client even though its Enabled and you have two Edge Appliances deployed.

NSX_HA_1

If you go to the CLI of either of the deployed Edge Appliances and run the show service highavailability command you will get the response shown below:

NSX_HA_2

I did a search for Highavailability Healthcheck server is stopped and didn’t get any hits…hence me putting together this post to specifically tackle that message however looking back through my earlier post on Edge Gateway HA (http://anthonyspiteri.net/nsx-edge-vs-vshield-edge-part-2-high-availability/ I did make note of the fact you need at least one vNIC configured.

So, while not so much as a quirk as more a case of by design the edge High Availability Service will only kick in once the first Internal vNIC has been added and configured. If you have enabled HA after doing the initial interface configurations you won’t have this issue as during the HA setup you are asked which vNIC to choose. If you enable HA without a vNIC configured the service won’t kick in until that vNIC is in play. Once this has been done the HA Service kicks in and configures both edges…if you run the show service command again you should now see the Highavailability Status as Running and details on the HA configuration of the NSX Edge pair.

NSX_HA_3

Looking back at the Web Client you will now see the High Availability Service as Up

NSX_HA_4

For more info on understanding HA and some more troubleshooting steps @gabe_rosas has a great post here: