ESXi 5.5 U2 connectivity problem

[drobnjakm]

Hello,

I have assembled a home server with i5 proc,32 GB of memory and 3 network cards.

I managed to install ESXi 5.5U2 , but only after I customized ESXi ISO with qualcom VIB file.

That allowed me to have only one NIC on my server , cause ESXi installation doesn't recognize the other two.

Because of that I wanted to use that one NIC card as a trunk for the to the rest of my network.

I connected the lan cabl from server NIC to cisco 3750G switch and configured switch port as a trunk.

I am able to ping from my desktop computer my gateway,other machines in same and other vlans,ESXi gateway,ESXi NIC ip address.

I can acess trough vSphere client to my server and create VM .

On the server side I create vlans on the vSwitch and add VMs to the apropriate vlan.

I can ping between VMs but I can't ping ESXi host IP address or any of the VLAN interfaces on the switch or anything connected on the switch .

I tried changing ESXi host NIC VLAN to 4095 (trunk) and NONE but that didn't help.

It seems like my ESXI host NIC is not in trunk mode.

If anyone has the same problem or soultion for it please give some hint.

Thanks!

[brunofernandez1]

what about trying to ping from the esxi console?

have a look on this kb article. here it's explained how to ping with vmkping:

VMware KB: Testing VMkernel network connectivity with the vmkping command

maybe ICMP is disabled on the esxi firewall?

[drobnjakm]

Hi brunofernandez1, I tried your advice and tested ping from SSH on the ESXi host.

The situation i the same.

IP address of the host is 10.160.12.12, and GW on the L3 swich is 10.160.12.1.

From the ssh console on the ESXI host I can successfully ping GW 12.1,  other VLAN GWs  31.1, 32.1, machines connected to cisco switch in various VLANs.

But when I try to ping any of the VM on the host ping fails. When I ping from one VM to another VM ping is successfull .

But again from the VM I can't ping neither the ESXi host IP address neiter anything on the Cisco Switch.

Like the trunking on the ESXi host between vSwitch and real physical Cisco switch is not operational.

I searched entire vsphere client networking settings and everything seems to be in order but I can't reach VM from the cisco switch and vice versa.

[brunofernandez1]

show us a printscreen with you vswitch configuration, vlan, vmnic etc...

[drobnjakm]

Here is the topology, I am using one NIC for MGMT and regular traffic.

Here is the MGMT network settings.

And here are the NIC details.

On the Cisco Switch Side I have ip routing enabled and multiple VLAN interfaces configured and I can ping between conected computers both in the same and different vlans.

Here is the configuration of the trunk port connected to the ESXi host.

description Trunk do ESXi servera

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport trunk native vlan 12      >>>>> Here I had to put native vlan 12 so I could even ping the ESXi host and access with vSphere client.<<<<<

switchport trunk allowed vlan 3,12,17,18,31,32

switchport mode trunk

switchport nonegotiate

spanning-tree portfast trunk

The strange thing for me is that I managed to do this pretty easily with another desktop machine and cisco switch with the same configuration.

I believe that drivers for Qualcom NIC on the motherboard are not ok, on the other desktop I had Realtek and used Realtek VIB file to customize ESXi ISO and everything works flowesly.

And also for the second ESXi with realtek card I had to put native vlan 12 command on the switch so I could access the host.

Is there some way to issue a sh int trunk command on the ESXi host perhaps ?