Dear community
The environment:
- ESXi 4.1 U1 HA-DRS Cluster (3 Hosts)
- vCenter is running in a VM within this cluster
- iSCSI LUNs as datastores
- Redundant vSwitches: e.g. vmnic0 -> SwitchA, vmnic1 -> SwitchB
- Switches: Cisco 2960G, no channeling/trunking possible
Now, SwitchA was down due to a power failure. Given that vSwitch0 consists of two vmnics (vmic0, vmnic1) in active/active configuration, I would assume that ESXi does transparently remove the failed link and continue to use only vmnic1 resulting in almost zero loss of packets.
Reality looked different. Due to the switch failure, the log showed:
"Lost uplink redundancy on virtual Switch "vSwitch0". Physical NIC vmnic0 is down. Affected portgroups: ..."
Shortly after I got these messages:
"Node esxi1 has stopped receiving heartbeats from Primary node esxi2 1/9. Declaring node as unresponsive."
"user esxi1 VMware HA Agent Isolated, Notifying VPXA"
Due to the isolation, all VMs were shutdown according to the HA configuration, which is expected.
So, the failover did not work as expected and all three hosts were isolated. Because all three are setup the same way, behaviour on all hosts was the same.
Management Network "Failover and Load Balancing" Parameters:
Load Balancing Port ID
Network Failure Detection: Link status only
Notify Switches: Yes
Failback: Yes
Active Adapters: vmnic0,vmnic1
Standby Adapters: None
Unused Adapters: None
Do you have any idea what could be wrong?
Thx
