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lcampalvazqu
Contributor
Contributor

Informational Home Lab - Workstation and nested VSphere 5.5 (ARP, LAN Segments and VSwitch)

Hi,

Writing this post mainly as information for possible testers out there, i expent some time trying to figure out the issue/solution. First, snapshot of the testing environment:

1 VMware Workstation 10.0.0.2

1 nested VSphere VCenter appliance 5.5

2 nested ESXi 5.5

1 FreeNAS for NFS datastores connected to management and storage LAN segments.

1 W2K8 connected to all 4 LAN segments

4 LAN Segments in WS to simulate vlans

4 VSwitches with one portgroup each (vmkernel management, vmkernel storage, vmkernel vmotion, vm traffic)

Vcenter, W2K8 and Freenas created without issues in any of the LAN segments. Now with ESXi, Management network is created by default upon installation, it works flawlesly and all the other VMs are able to communicate without issues. The problem started when playing with NFS connectivity, the next vswitch/portgroup to configure, storage network. IP assigned everything look good but not pingable from outside and could not ping world from inside, so start debugging.

1.- First was to start playing with different network drivers, e1000, vmxnet3,.. no luck.

2.- Delete, recreate, reinstall,... no luck.

3.- start using ESXi shell tools, vmkping, ping, esxcfg-vswitch, esxcfg-nics, esxcfg-vmknics trying to troubleshoot any configuration error, no luck

4.- tcpdump-uw -i vmk1 (the one assigned for storage) and at the same time trying to ping from any of the working ones (W2K8, Freenas or VCenter). It start displaying some ARP request packets with a different mac ARP reply, vmnic1 mac was not matching that one in the ARP reply from the ESXi. So where was that MAC coming from, easy one, vSwitch has a port where the portgroup is connecting to. ESXi configured vmknic was replying with the MAC address it had configured inside the VSwitch instead of the vmnic MAC configured in Workstation, where it should not be an issue, it seems that these vmknic MACs were not acknowledge or adquired by the VMWare Workstation LAN Segment infrastructure (feature is helpful for sure but not a real Switch) preventing complete solution to work.

Now that we know the issue in this particular environment, that when you configure manually the other vSwitched/portgroups does not maintain the internal vmknic MAC the same as the external vmnic MAC. As management, the created during installation is configured with both MACs matching, the solution was simple:

1.- "esxcfg-nics -l" to obtain the external vmnic MAC (or check WS vm configuration)

2.- "esxcfg-vmknic -d PORTGROUPNAME" to delete the affected portgroup vmknic.

3.- "esxcfg-vmknic -a -i IPADDRESS -n NETMASK -M VMNICMAC PORTGROUPNAME" this will recreate the vmknic with a forced MAC from the external interface so VMWare Workstation knows were to send things in the LAN Segment.

Not sure why default vswitch/portgroup installed one match both MACs because i think they SHOULD be different as with the other cases. Hope this has been useful for anyone, i am not a blogger so just though this forum could be the right place for other to search for it.

Best regards.

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