We wanted to add a VxRail VI WLD because we had four VxRail Nodes in our demo environment that had become free. This time we wanted it do it the “new way” which is possible since Version 5.2 – using the SDDC Manager UI instead of the WFO script.

During the addition of the VI WLD we ran into a failure in the validation step “Validate Management Domain has enough Resources for NSX Data Center Deployment”. The SDDC Manager was telling us that “not enough resources found in management domain”. Especially strange was the part of available “Memory: -211 GB”:

The VI WLD has its vCenter and NSX Managers running in the Management WLD cluster and this cluster is fairly well utilized but we were pretty sure that we had enough ressources for the deployment of these VMs. After some research in the word wide web without success we tried various things to reduce the used memory in our cluster: we removed memory reservations (especially the NSX Managers and NSX Edges), suspended VMs and later even completely shutdown some bigger lab VMs and the complete Aria Suite. But nothing changed.

Finally, after removing two VMs with overall 12GB memory from the vCenter inventory the result looked a little bit different:

We followed this trail and temporarly reduced the configured memory of all “powered off” Aria and lab VMs to 1MB so that we had definitely more than enough memory for the VI WLD VMs. With this workaround, we were able to complete the deployment.

In summary, it seems that the validation is looking for the total configured memory of all(!) VMs in the Management WLD cluster instead of looking only for all running “powered on” VMs.

I hope this short post can be helpful to you. Feel free to share if you like…

// footnotes:

Date: 16.12.2024
Version: 1.0