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barnette08
Expert
Expert

vSphere 7.0U1 Nested with Mac Learn

Hey all,

I've put together a 7.0U1 environment nested on top of a 7.0U1 environment.  I originally went the old way of promiscuous mode and things were functioning fine, but wanted to tune the environment for the obvious reasons.  When I convert the portgroups to have MacLearn enabled on them using the below blog post from William Lam, is seems to take my hosts offline.  Even after reboot they remain offline until I create a new portgroup with the original settlings.  Anyone have some ideas on how to track this down or has anyone successfully done this on 7.0 yet?  TIA!

https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2018/04/native-mac-learning-in-vsphere-6-7-removes-the-need-for-prom...

DVPortgroup : esxi-trunk-a
MacLearning : True
NewAllowPromiscuous : False
NewForgedTransmits : True
NewMacChanges : False
Limit : 4096
LimitPolicy : DROP
LegacyAllowPromiscuous : False
LegacyForgedTransmits : True
LegacyMacChanges : False

 

DVPortgroup : esxi-trunk-b
MacLearning : True
NewAllowPromiscuous : False
NewForgedTransmits : True
NewMacChanges : False
Limit : 4096
LimitPolicy : DROP
LegacyAllowPromiscuous : False
LegacyForgedTransmits : True
LegacyMacChanges : False

 

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barnette08
Expert
Expert

Interestingly I was able to get this working with new VM's vs. VMs that were already running while making the change.  I'm still digging into it for more detail.

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Tattoofreak
Contributor
Contributor

I'm in the same boat. Did you find out more about this?

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barnette08
Expert
Expert

New VMs connecting to the port group seemed to work fine, but modifying the port group with VMs connecting to it did not.  Other than that, I wasn't able to really determine why that was happening but since it worked for new VMs I was able to move forward with what I was doing.

Tattoofreak
Contributor
Contributor

So the script is still working in vSphere 7? Because when I've tried a couple of months ago I wasn't even able to execute the command as desribed in VirtuallyGhetto's tutorial (look at comments section there, other users had the same behaviour as me).

Are your dvSwitches on dvSwitch version 6.x or 7.x?

 

EDIT:

OK, I think I got it now. It's working on vSphere 7 but only when running the according dvSwitch on version 6.x.

@barnette08 Thanks so far for posting this which brought me in the right direction.

iforbes
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Did you get this to work running VDS 7? I need to run VDS 7 and was wondering if the MAC learning script works with that version?

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Tattoofreak
Contributor
Contributor

Nope, with vDS 7 it won't work. It works only with vDS 6.6 and 6.7 AFAIK.

But remember: You can use a vDS 6.x within vSphere 7 without problems.

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iforbes
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Thanks. I need vDS 7 though as I want to run NSX-T on vDS capability (i.e. not have to worry about creating a separate N-VDS):

https://rutgerblom.com/2020/04/08/nsx-t-3-0-meets-vsphere-7-vds-7-0/

I have 2 ESXi nodes in my lab. I guess i'll create a 2-node physical VSAN cluster and deploy NSX-T 3.1 with VDS 7. I'll follow William Lam's blog on configuring the MAC Learning within an NSX-T network profile and apply that to a 'nested-esxi' network segment. After that I'll bee able to deploy nested ESXi on those NSX-T segments.

https://williamlam.com/2019/11/running-nested-esxi-nsx-v-or-nsx-t-on-top-of-nsx-t.html

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