This week I installed VMWare NSX and created a new NSX manager instance. After deploying the OVF and prepping my cluster members I went to create the three recommended controller nodes. This resulted in a “Failed to power on VM NSX Controller” error which didn’t make sense. The package was installed correctly, the configuration parameters were correct and I double and tripled checked that the controllers could communicate with my NSX manager. NSX manager provides appmgmt, system and manager logs which can be viewed with the show utility:
nsx> show log manager follow
To see what was going on I tailed the manager log and attempted to create another controller. The creation failed but the following log entry was generated:
inherited from com.vmware.vim.binding.vim.fault.InsufficientFailoverResourcesFault:
Insufficient resources to satisfy configured failover level for vSphere HA.
I had a cluster node in maintenance mode to apply some security updates so this made total sense. Adding the node back to the cluster allowed me to create my controllers without issue.