NSX Controller forever deploying never working

I ran into an issue with NSX in the home lab where a new NSX controller was deploying and a power outage interrupted the deployment.  This left me in a state of deploying forever.  After waiting a day and being in the same state I removed the inoperable virtual machine from vCenter.  The issue persisted in NSX.

As you can see controller-18 is forever deploying.  The NSX manager command line showed it as deploying so it’s a database issue somewhere.  Since the deployment action was in place it was impossible to remove the controller and the cluster health was bad with only two controllers.   I don’t have any magic method for working with the NSX manager database (I assume it’s postgres but I really don’t know) other than the API.  So off to the API I went.   First I wanted to query for all controllers to make sure I had the correct name (ID field in picture above).   So I setup my REST connection for

https://IP_of_Manager/api/2.0/vdn/controller

I returned that the ID is indeed controller-18.   Once I knew the controller number is was a simple delete method with the right command line:

Removal via

https://nsx_manager_ip/api/2.0/vdn/controller/controller-18?forceRemoval=True

 

After this command I queried again to confirm it was gone:

Since 18 was my last controller it returned nothing.   Hopefully if you have a stuck deploying NSX controller this article will help you remove it.