Hello
I am looking for some advise on vMotion please? I have read through a number of dicussions, but nothing seems to cover this.
In November we installed 5 Dell R710 servers with vSphere 4.1 and the latest update. Last week I installed additional Nics into these servers and configued the a new vSwitch for vMotion, assigning 2 physical nics to the vSwitch (nic8 and nic10). These new Nics are both Intel 82576 Dual Port PCI-E cards.
I can vMotion between these host perfectly.
This week I have installed 2 new R710 servers (same CPUs, but with the additional Nics factory installed) however, this time (as I am setting them up not a 3rd party) I have setup vMotion on nic2 and nic6. nic2 is the onboard Broadcom quadport, nic6 is another Intel 82576 Dual Port card.
I can vMotion between the new hosts without issue, however, I am having trouble vMotioning between the old and new hosts, it times out at 10% and on a putty sessions I cannot maintain a ping.
So far, I have been able to ascertain that if I remove the cable from nic6, or remove nic6 from the vSwitch, then the ping runs and I can vMotion between the old and new hosts. However, if I have just nic6 or have nic6 connected I cannot.
vMotion is running via 2 Dell 5424 switches, nic8 (old servers) and nic2 (new servers) are on one switch, nic10 (old) and nic6 (new) are on the other. The 2 switches are not linked. I have tried swapping nic2 and nic6 over, and the fault follows, so I am fairly confident it is not a switch issue (as the same switches are used for iSCSI and that works as expected).
I note that there is a difference in BIOS versions on the server, and I will try updating that tomorrow, but I am not sure why that would cause the problem. It is Intel to Intel that is faulty, Intel to Broadcom works, and I would expect it to be the other way around. Another thing I will try is changing to another nic in place of nic6, i.e. nic11 which is on a different card and see what that does, although I would expect that to only be an issue on one server, not both of the new ones.
Can any one shed any light on this please? It has me stumped at the moment. I can get it to work by only using 1 nic, but that still leaves the problem, it is only a workaround.
If you need more info, please ask
Thanks
Frankie
Welcome to the forums Frankie.
Firstly I would confirm that all vMotioning is happening on a single flat network subnet. vMotion does not work between subnets or VLAN's.
Then the second step to eliminate possibilities would be taking all vMotion NIC's and plugging them into a single flat physical switch without VLAN tags. If vMotion works then you probably have an issue with your network or switch configuration in your datacentre. Otherwise it is probably an issue with your host configuration.
Some links worth having a look at are:
http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vsphere-host-nic-configuration-10-nics.html
http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vsphere-host-nic-design-6-nics.html
Regards,
Paul
