vSphere Availability

Currently we have 2 DL380 G5's with 6 avaliable NIC's in them. We're running vsphere 4.0 ESXi. I have the networking setup as followed: vSwitch 0 (this has all our VM's, and our Management network) and vSwitch1 (vMotion network only). vSwitch0 has 5 physical NIC's connected to it in an active state. vSwitch1 only has physical NIC assigned to it.

I had a request today from one of our system admin that they needed to some testing, and one of the VM's needed to be added to the DMZ. So I setup a seprate vSwitch for the DMZ traffic, and then added another NIC to that VM that was connected to the DMZ vSwitch. After I went into the main vSwitch0 and removed one of the Physical NIC's I noticed all the VM's on this Host turned off.

I thought by having all 5 NIC's active this shouldn't happen if one of them went down or removed? Or was this caused because I only have 1 Management Network setup to that vSwitch, and when I removed the one physical nic from that vSwitch it had to "take down that vSwitch" to reconfigure it?

I just need some claification as to where I have my mistake so this doesn't happen again if we need to do further testing.

Thanks for any help.

HA on the host lost connectivity to its isolation address (default gateway by default) maybe. You must set more than 1 isolation address, in different networks, in case you don't want this to happen again:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002117

The KB is pretty old but the config is the same for vCenter 4.

Marcelo Soares

VMWare Certified Professional 310/410

Technical Support Engineer

Globant Argentina

Consider awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

Just want to clairify before I make the changes. I should have 2 of the vSwitches (on each machine) setup for management traffic? Then I should be able to put das.isoluationaddress1 - 4 with the 4 address (2 from each boxes)?

The isolation address should be an IP independent from your ESX boxes. You will have 2 IP's for management on each of your ESX, each IP on a different subnet mask. And you will have 2 isolation addresses, each one on the saparated network you configured for the ESX's. Example:

ESX1

IP1: 10.1.1.100

IP2: 192.168.1.100

Isolation addr1: 10.1.1.1

Isolation addr2: 192.168.1.1

ESX2

IP1: 10.1.1.101

IP2: 192.168.1.101

Isolation addr1: 10.1.1.1

Isolation addr2: 192.168.1.1

Marcelo Soares

VMWare Certified Professional 310/410

Technical Support Engineer

Globant Argentina

Consider awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.