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2 Replies Last post: Jun 12, 2009 2:31 PM by Brijn
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VMware flooding network with LLC broadcast messages

Jun 12, 2009 1:33 PM

Click to view Brijn's profile Enthusiast Brijn 32 posts since
Aug 11, 2006
Hello,

Walking past a switch today I noticed all the lights blinking at a very high rate. We where not doing any Ghost multicasts, so there should not be that many broadcasts in our network.
Wireshark quickly showed VMWARE Mac addresses sending a huge amount of LLC messages.

Our network is very simple, one subnet, no VLAN's etc

Google and search of VMTN only returned a lot of post from people working at LLC's :)

1) Is it normal to see that many LLC messages
2) what is their function
3) can I do anything to reduce it

Tx!
Bas
Reply Re: VMware flooding network with LLC broadcast messages Jun 12, 2009 2:03 PM
Click to view mehul96's profile Hot Shot mehul96 118 posts since
Mar 16, 2009
Could you tell us a bit more about you environment? Like How many ESX servers and how are they wired? With Virtual Center? How many VMs and their operating systems?
Reply Re: VMware flooding network with LLC broadcast messages Jun 12, 2009 2:31 PM
in response to: mehul96
Click to view Brijn's profile Enthusiast Brijn 32 posts since
Aug 11, 2006

Hi,

Absolutely!

Three HP BL465c blades in a HP c3000 (aka Shorty) enclosure. Blades run ESX 3.5 (latest). Blades are connected to (the internal ports) a GbE2c HP switch blade (two in chassis for redundancy). The blade switches are connected via a 2G trunk to a netgear core switch. From there a bunch of other switches are connected. No vlan's etc.

Virtual center runs on a 4th blade (same HW, but no second CPU) in the enclosure.

A total of 11 VM's: Most Windows 2003, two Linux ones. Using the RVTools utility that I just discovered I can see that the MAC listed in the capture are NOT VM Guest MAC's (RVtools shows the guest MAC's, unfortunately not the actual host MAC's)

tx

Bas


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