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larstr
Champion
Champion

Pause frames+25GbE

We're seeing a lot of pause frames being transmitted from our ESXi hosts with 25GbE. Hosts with 10GbE are not transmitting any such frames. We're seeing this issue with both Mellanox and Broadcom and firmware+drivers on both types of nics are within the HCL.

larstr_0-1621412974358.png

Anyone else seen this issue before?

 

Lars

6 Replies
pkvmw
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi,

are you running ESXi 7.0 GA by any chance? If so, it could be: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83243. The first thing that came into my mind based on your description.

Regards,
Patrik

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larstr
Champion
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Patrik,

Yes, we're on VMware ESXi, 7.0.1, 17551050 (Update 1) and jumbo frames are indeed in use, but we're not seeing such messages in vmkernel.log as the issue was fixed in U1.

 

Lars

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larstr
Champion
Champion

The output with Mellanox cards is slightly different:

larstr_1-1621421059587.png

 

 

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larstr
Champion
Champion

The values suggested in the kb article you referred wasn't set even though we're on 7.0U1. I then tried to set the values manually, but we still see pause frames being transmitted (~100 per minute):

larstr_0-1621428018962.png

Lars

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larstr
Champion
Champion

We're now on U2 and we've found that we're only seeing this issue on hosts with 2x64 core AMD cpu and 25GbE nics. Nic brand doesn't matter as we have hosts with both Mellanox and Broadcom nics and the output is very similar.

 

Lars

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Km0s
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Yes 😉 Please have a look at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/50121760

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