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borisk_nt
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi and QinQ

Good day to all!

Very relevant question to me - can or can not Guest work with QinQ traffic? I looked over all the Internet, have read tons of articles. The answer is only one - You can't, even in VTG mode such traffic is dropped. There is one solution with changing ethertype, but it is too complex to realize. But life is strange and full of suprises. So

ESXi

Version:

6.5.0 (Build 4887370)

With Mikrotik CHR and ...   QinQ works well! I thought nonsense but it works! Created guest VTG port group, I created some SVLANs and User VLANs, all with standard ethertype and all works fine. May be something changes and nobody knows? So another test

ESXi

Version:

6.7.0 Update 1 (Build 10302608)

do all the same and ....... nothing works. Try to solve what's wrong. I see - QinQ traffic is passed inside the guest. Guest also double tags traffic. But outside of ESXi  ...... inner tag is stripped by someone

So what is it? 6.5 bug? Or all should be working at the moment and this is 6.7 bug? Or this is my mistake?

Help, please!

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jerrybonner
Contributor
Contributor

I am seeing the exact same behavior. We are running 6.0 and somewhere on build 13003896 (10719132 works ok) we're seeing inner tags stripped which is rendering our NFV applications completely useless. I cannot find anything in any release notes regarding this behavior. It seems ridiculous that a major behavior like this was introduced in a patch.

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

Have you tried updating the network card firmware, and confirmed its on a supported level with esxi. I've hardly ever seen qinq questions here, and I've never seen anywhere use it, but with vmware having a whole vxlan product I'm not sure how they would put into making qinq to work. I think if it did work it would be reliant on the network card  drivers in esxi more than a specifiic version.Again I am only aware of what qinq is, I've never seen it used in vmware, but figured I'd give you my thoughts as I doubt there would be a response on this one.

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jerrybonner
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, we have Intel x710 NICs. We have tried the latest i40en 1.9.5 driver on the latest 6.0 build 15018929 as recommended here :

VMware Compatibility Guide - I/O Device Search

Still same behavior. Inner tags are removed on ingress from router to host, and removed from guest to router. The removal of just the inner tag is bizarre. This behavior seems intentional and not at all related to NIC hardware.

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jerrybonner
Contributor
Contributor

Also, using 802.1ad ethertypes has no affect on this behavior.

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