VLAN tagging issue

[ufo8mydog]

I've been doing some research on 'best practices' networking and decided to test this on a new cluster.

1) I tagged a vmotion port group with a VLAN tag of 30 on 2 ESX hosts

2) The vmotion port group is on its own subnet separate from anything else (10.0.2.0/24)

3) In the switch interfaces (Dell Powerconnect 6248) I go to 'Bind IP subnet to VLAN', and bind VLAN 30 to 10.0.2.0/24

I then try a vmotion, and it fails at 10%, most likely a network issue as all hosts are defined in /etc/hosts and times are synced.

So, I remove the vlan tags, remove the binding in step 3, and voila, vmotion works once more!

Does anyone have any tips here to share on what went wrong? Perhaps more importantly do I actually need to have a vlan tag? Since the vmotion vmkernel is in its own vswitch and separate subnet it seems that the traffic is fully separated already...

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

3) In the switch interfaces (Dell Powerconnect 6248) I go to 'Bind IP subnet to VLAN', and bind VLAN 30 to 10.0.2.0/24

You have a dedicated NIC (or NICs) only for VMotions?

You have to tag your switch's port (or put in trunk and enable the VLAN30).

At this point do not use Bind IP (is just to prevent spoofing).

First try to configured the right port - VLAN membership.

Also a vmkping between the two VMotion port could be useful for diagnostic.

Andre

**if you found this or any other answer useful please consider allocating points for helpful or correct answers

[ufo8mydog]

Ok Andre, the NICs are dedicated so that should work.

[AndreTheGiant]

Ok Andre, the NICs are dedicated so that should work.

In this case you can use default port type (access), and just remove from VLAN 1 and put them in VLAN 30.

Andre

**if you found this or any other answer useful please consider allocating points for helpful or correct answers