Comments on: Using VMware ESX Virtual Switch Tagging with HP Virtual Connect

By: slowe

slowe — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 01:27:26 +0000

Ken, thanks for jumping on here and helping out some of these readers. Will this vCenter plugin help them resolve their ARP issues?

(BTW, for those that don’t know, Ken—aka @bladeguy on Twitter—works for HP and is a great resource for these sorts of questions.)

By: Ken Henault

Ken Henault — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:41:45 +0000

RT,

Try using the Virtual Connect plug-in for Virtual Center. It is available at http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html This will give you a graphical end-to-end view of your network connectivity: vNIC -> vSwitch -> Virtual Connect -> upstream switch.

This will help you confirm that you have the network set up the way you think you do.

Some additional resources:

HP/VMware home page
http://www.hp.com/go/vmware

Virtual Connect Ethernet Cookbook
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01990371/c01990371.pdf
I often use Scenario 2:3 for ESX implementations

Let me know if this helps.

Ken

By: slowe

slowe — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:43:47 +0000

All, I don’t have any additional information on this, but let me see if I can find an HP resource who might be able to help.

By: rt

rt — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:14:14 +0000

same issue as chuck, diego, jon, daniel any resolution to this?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:04:42 +0000

I’m actually having this bizarre problem as Chuck, Diego and Jon. Has anyone had any luck with this? Maybe even where the problem lies (HP VC, switch or esx/vm)?

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:48:00 +0000

Hello Chuck, and Diego. We are having the same problem have you been able to resolve the issue. We have been working with HP, Cisco, and VmWare and no one seems to be able to find out what is happening.

By: Vote Early (But Don’t Vote Often) - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:35:45 +0000

[...] VMware ESX Networking via CLI Introduction to Nehalem Memory (by guest author Aaron Delp) Using VMware ESX Virtual Switch Tagging with HP Virtual Connect Another Reason Not to Use PVSCSI or [...]

By: Diego

Diego — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:45:25 +0000

Hello Chuck Hooper, how you resolve the issue with ARP?, i have the same problem.
Regards

By: Chuck Hooper

Chuck Hooper — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:29:08 +0000

We’re setting things up similar to Greg, however I’ve run into an ODD issue where the ARP requests from a Guest VM to the Cisco Gateway is never getting back to the VM. I can use ICMP pings of other servers on the same VLAN (across switches mind you) and it works fine. Have a case open with Vmware on it, but haven’t heard back

By: Greg Palmer

Greg Palmer — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:05:20 +0000

We have set up our flex 10′s with an LACP port channel to each flex 10 module. The shared uplink sets are named like sus_VDC-Set1-A and
sus_VDC-Set1-A-B. Suppose these carry vlan ids 100,200, 300 and 400.
I define networks on each of the uplink sets as nw_100-A and nw_100-B for the respective uplink sets. Then when setting up NICs you choose an uplink set for the NIC and only select networks defined on that uplink set. This prevents loops as the left NIC’s go out sus A and the right NIC’s go out sus B. Then we make a failover ot TeLB bond for the NIC’s. Done! Dual redundant LACP paths back to different switches with the host responsible for failover.

One other thing to think about is that if you alternate the sever profiles so that say everyblade in an odd slot uses sus A for the left NIC and every even slot uses sus B for the left NIC then you can get the incoming traffic to the blades coming in both sus’s rather than just the left without mucking around too much with preferences in the teaming config. Setting the first NIC always as the preferred master will then cause things to failover and fail back at the host level.