vSphere 5.1 Update 2 VMs dropping network.

[vfk]

Hi,

I have recently updated my environment to vSphere 5.1 U2 and have noticed VMs randomly dropping IP addresses, has anyone else observed this issue?  So far I have seen it only on three VMs all same symptoms.  I have updated VMs 2 days ago.

Regards

[JPM300]

Hey vfk,

How long do they drop the packets for?  also is the VMware tools up to date on those systems?

I also found this in the ESXi 5.0 update 2 release notes:

ESXi 5.1 Update 2 Release Notes

Network packets drop is incorrectly reported in esxtop between two virtual machines on the same ESXi host and vSwitch

When two virtual machines are configured with e1000 driver on the same vSwitch on a host, the network traffic between the two virtual machines might report significant packet drop in esxtop. This happens because during reporting there is no accounting for split packets when you enable TSO from guest.

This issue is resolved in this release.

Maybe it hasn't been resloved???

[WessexFan]

Any more details? What do the 3 machines have in common? Same OS? same NIC drivers? Are they running same tools version?

[vfk]

These are Windows 2003 VMs (I know I know, EOL soon), some legacy applications running on these VMs.  This wasn't related to the upgrades, application causes the OS to hang.

Thanks for the quick reply.

[AlbertWT]

Hi guys,

I'm also having similar issue where I get high TCP retransmission packet rate detected by the Riverbed SteelApp appliance. When looking at the release note on the ESXi 5.1 update ESXi 5.1 Update 2 Release Notes

it only reports or say the "Incorrectly Reported" so I guess it is not an actual problem ?