Vmotion network

[phil435]

I am setting up a multiple nic vmotion network in esxi 5.5. I created a seperate vswitch for this network and a segmented vlan as well. This scenario will not work unless I use the same subnet as the managment network. I thought that you could use seperate subnets for management and vmotion networks? If I use vmkping utility it tells me multiple networks are found and defaults to the management gateway which is wrong.

[rcporto]

I thought that you could use seperate subnets for management and vmotion networks?

Yes you can... and this is the recommended design.

About multiple NIC vMotion, did you already checked this KB article: VMware KB: Multiple-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5

And you need default gateway configured only on management VMkernel adapter.

[phil435]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I did follow the KB article you mentioned below. The vmkpings will fail when I set the vmotion vmk ports to a different subnet than what the management is on. The default gateway is only set for the management vlan as well. What is strange is I have a similiar setup for my iSCSI vmk ports and it works fine. I have tried both access and trunk ports on the backend switch with no luck. What throws me off is when I use traceroute from the esxi host it informs me that multiple gateways are found and defaults to the vmk port that the management vlan and gateway is on.

I did create a case on this and support recommended that I use the same subnet as the management network. This does indeed work and when I vmotion I see both ports get utilized and it only travels across the vmotion network as expected. This is contrary to everything I have read and what you stated as well.

My next troubleshooting step will be to create port mirrors on the upstream switch and verify that the traffic is indeed going to the proper port when using vmkping with Wireshark. This is pretty basic L2 stuff but I guess there could be a remote chance that something is wrong with the upstream switch. I will probably connect two PC's as well and make sure that they can communicate on the switchports as well. Thanks!

[rcporto]

Just some additional queries:

- the management VMkernel port have vMotion traffic unchecked ?

- you're are using vmkping with "-I vmkx" switch when testing vMotion network ?

- there is any VLAN configured on physical switches ?

- did you tried remove all VMotion VMkernel and created them again ?

[phil435]

Thanks Richardson again for the replies. I did get this resolved. Apparently when I was tagging the vmks with the vlan id it wasn't allowing the traffic to pass. To get this to work I set the vlan tag to none(0) on the vmk and the physical switchports to access mode with the relevant vlan id.