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Nick Schmidt
Nick Schmidt

Posted on • Originally published at blog.engyak.co on

NSX Advanced Load Balancer - NSX-T Service Engine Creation Failures: `CC_SE_CREATION_FAILURE` and `Transport Node Not Found...

TL;DR

If you see either of these errors, check grep 'ERROR' /opt/avi/log/cc_agent_go_{{ cloud }} for the potential cause. In my case, the / character was not correctly processed by Avi's Golang client (facing vCenter).

The Problem

When trying to configure NSX ALB + NSX-T on my home lab, I am presented nothing but the following error:

CC_SE_CREATION_FAILURE

The Process

Avi Vantage appears to be treating this as a retriable error, attempting to deploy a service engine five times, which can be re-executed with a controller restart:

[

Avi Controller Logs

](avi-1.png)

Oddly enough, vCenter doesn't report any OVA deploy attempts. The next thing to check here would be the vSphere content library:**

[

vSphere Content Library

](avi-2.png)

So far, so good. vCenter knows where to deploy the image from.

Now here's a problem - Avi doesn't provide any documentation on how to troubleshoot this yet - so I did a bit of digging and found that you can bump yourself to root by performing a:

1sudo su

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Useful note: Avi Vantage is running bullseye/sid with only 821 packages listed under dpkg -l | wc -l. They did do a pretty good job with pre-release cleanup, but there are still a few oddball packages in there. I'd give it a 9/10, I'd like to see X11 not be installed but am pleased to see only Python 3!

Avi's logs are located in:

1/var/lib/avi/log
2/opt/avi/log

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what I found in alert_notifications_debug.log:

 1summary: "Syslog for System Events occured"  
 2event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_VS"  
 3event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_CNTLR"  
 4event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_ALL"  
 5obj_name: "avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
 6tenant_uuid: "admin"  
 7related uuids ['avi_-Avi-se-rctbp']  
 8[2021-04-09 20:06:30,923] INFO [alert_engine.processAlertInstance:225] [uuid: ""  
 9alert_config_uuid: "alertconfig-938cf267-e20d-4d8e-a50a-21f0f5a5b633"  
10timestamp: 1617998694.0  
11obj_uuid: "avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
12threshold: 0  
13events {  
14 report_timestamp: 1617998694  
15 obj_type: SEVM  
16 event_id: CC_SE_CREATION_FAILURE  
17 module: CLOUD_CONNECTOR  
18 internal: EVENT_EXTERNAL  
19 context: EVENT_CONTEXT_SYSTEM  
20 obj_uuid: "avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
21 obj_name: "avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
22 event_details {  
23 cc_se_vm_details {  
24 cc_id: "cloud-022c7b90-f987-4b15-91bb-1f1405715580"  
25 se_vm_uuid: "avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
26 error_string: "Transport node not found to create serviceengine avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
27 }  
28 }  
29 event_description: "Service Engine creation failure"  
30 event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_VS"  
31 event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_CNTLR"  
32 event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_ALL"  
33 tenant_name: ""  
34 tenant: "admin"  
35}  
36reason: "threshold_exceeded"  
37state: ALERT_STATE_ON  
38related_uuids: "avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
39level: ALERT_LOW  
40name: "Syslog-System-Events-avi_-Avi-se-rctbp-1617998694.0-1617998694-45824571"  
41summary: "Syslog for System Events occured"  
42event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_VS"  
43event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_CNTLR"  
44event_pages: "EVENT_PAGE_ALL"  
45obj_name: "avi_-Avi-se-rctbp"  
46tenant_uuid: "admin"

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From the looks of things - Avi is talking with NSX-T before vCenter to determine appropriate placement, which makes sense.

Update and Root Cause

With the Avi 20.1.6 release, VMware has made a lot of improvements to logging! We're now seeing this error in the GUI (Ensure that "Internal Events" is checked:

[

Avi Events

](avi-3.png)

[

Avi Event

](avi-4.png)

Let's take a look at the new logging. Avi's controller system leverages a series of Go modules called "cloud connectors" dedicated to that specific interface. Each one has its own log file in


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12021-07-04T20:20:42.801Z ERROR vcenterlib/vcenter_utils.go:606 [10.66.0.202][avi-mgt-vni-10.7.80.0/24] object references is empty

22021-07-04T20:20:42.819Z ERROR vcenterlib/vcenter_utils.go:578 [10.66.0.202][avi-mgt-vni-10.7.80.0/24] object references is empty

32021-07-04T20:20:42.822Z ERROR vcenterlib/vcenter_se_lifecycle.go:432 [10.66.0.202][QH] [10.66.0.202] Network 'avi-mgt-vni-10.7.80.0/24' matching not found in Vcenter

42021-07-04T20:20:42.822Z ERROR vcenterlib/vcenter_se_lifecycle.go:891 [10.66.0.202] [10.66.0.202] Network 'avi-mgt-vni-10.7.80.0/24' matching not found in Vcenter




Now, this **_vn-segment_** does exist in vCenter, so I tried the "non-escaped shell character" knowledge from years of Linux/Unix administration and reformatted it to _ **avi-mgt-vni-10.7.80.0\_24**._

Since we don't get a **Redeploy**  (please VMware!) button, I restarted the controller and all SE deployments succeeded after that.
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