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kchowell
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-24-2014 07:41 AM

ESXi 5.1 appears to drop traffic

I have an ESXi 5.1 server with two physical interfaces. One is connected to the regular network and used for server access etc. The second nic is connected to a network tap (aka SPAN port).

Internally, the second nic is connected to a vswitch with promiscuous mode enabled. No IP is configured.

The problem I am seeing is that virtual machines connected to the 'tap' vswitch only see one side of the connection.

I have eliminated the tap configuration by connecting a physical machine to the interface. It is not the OS on the VM, since that works as expected when on a physical host.

It seems the only remaining place for the problem to exist is in the way ESXi handles raw interfaces or the way the vswitch handles raw packets.

Does anyone have any similar experiences, or further debugging that I can do to try and identify the problem? (yes, I have ssh access)

The tcpdump-uw command is less than helpful on this interface :-

~ # tcpdump-uw -i /dev/vmnic1

tcpdump-uw: SIOCGIFHWADDR: Invalid argument

Thank you in advance

--

Keith

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2 Replies
zXi_Gamer
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎03-24-2014 09:41 PM

Welcome to the communities,

tcpdump-uw -i /dev/vmnic1

The above command will work on vmk0 adapters and not physical nics. For example:

tcpdump-uw -i vmk0

Can you provide the following outputs:

esxcfg-vswitch -l

and esxcfg-nics -l

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kchowell
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-25-2014 06:38 AM 

Can you provide the following outputs:
esxcfg-vswitch -l
and esxcfg-nics -l


~ # esxcfg-vswitch -l

Switch Name      Num Ports   Used Ports  Configured Ports  MTU     Uplinks

vSwitch0         128         17          128               1500    vmnic0

  PortGroup Name        VLAN ID  Used Ports  Uplinks

  VM Network            0        13          vmnic0

  Management Network    0        1           vmnic0

Switch Name      Num Ports   Used Ports  Configured Ports  MTU     Uplinks

vSwitch1         128         7           128               1500    vmnic1

  PortGroup Name        VLAN ID  Used Ports  Uplinks

  SF Span Port          0        4           vmnic1

Switch Name      Num Ports   Used Ports  Configured Ports  MTU     Uplinks

vSwitch2         128         3           128               1500

  PortGroup Name        VLAN ID  Used Ports  Uplinks

  Isolated AD Labnet    0        2

Switch Name      Num Ports   Used Ports  Configured Ports  MTU     Uplinks

vSwitch3         128         2           128               1500

  PortGroup Name        VLAN ID  Used Ports  Uplinks

  Firewall LAN          0        1

~ # esxcfg-nics -l

Name    PCI           Driver      Link Speed     Duplex MAC Address       MTU    Description

vmnic0  0000:01:00.00 bnx2        Up   100Mbps   Full   90:b1:1c:14:99:2c 1500   Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5716 1000Base-T

vmnic1  0000:01:00.01 bnx2        Up   1000Mbps  Full   90:b1:1c:14:99:2d 1500   Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5716 1000Base-T

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