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SandyB
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Running ESXi5 as a nested VM - network issues

Hi There

I am in the process of setting up a lab to evaluate the new functionality in vSphere 5.

I have set up a Physical Dell PE2950 ( dual Quad core cpu and 32Gb of RAM) with ESXi 5 installed. i have followed the instructions found here and made the changes to the physical ESXi and made the change vhv.allow = "TRUE"  to /etc/vmware/config.

I have created a standard vSwitch on the pESXi and set it to promiscuis mode.

i have created 2 vESXi 5 VMs with 2 vSockets/4 vCores and 12Gb RAM, the have 1 vNic (E1000) connected to the standard switch above. when i configure the IP etc they start to ping then after 30-60 seconds the stop. i'm a bit stumpped does anyone have any ideas?

thanks

S

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SandyB
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

a windows VM on the same vSwitch works without issue,

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Are the nested VMs able to ping each other?

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SandyB
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The nested ESXi VMs cannot ping each other,  the windows VM on the same vswitch can ping the physical host and any other network resources as expected but not the nested ESXis.

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SandyB
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

ok if i remove the physical nic from the vswitch all the vms attached can communicate, so whats the difference when the physical nic gets added?

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dkfbp
Expert
Expert

Hi,

We have had the same problem in our datacenter. We have a lot of virtual ESXi5 hosts running for training purposes. We had some weird network connectivity issues. After a lot of troubleshooting we found the culprit of the problem:

- All of the virtual ESXi5 hosts had the same MAC address on vmkernel0 interface.

After changing MAC address our connectivity was fully restored. To recreate your "Management Network" vmkernel with a new MAC use the following commands from the ESXi shell:

esxcfg-vmknic -d "Management Network"

esxcfg-vmknic -a -i 10.10.10.10 -n 255.255.255.0 "Management Network"
Best regards Frank Brix Pedersen blog: http://www.vfrank.org
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Before making copies of an ESXi VM, you should probably set the management interface MAC address to update whenever the hardware MAC address changes:

esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /Net/FollowHardwareMac

(I haven't actually tried this with ESXi5, but it used to work.)

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