Max vSwitch Ports used!

[Vyker]

Couple of questions here.

1) My vSwitch has several Portgroups attached, each with their own VLAN ID's. My vSwitch was set to 24 ports, however I have 28 active connections! How can they still all be running when I'm using more then the allow number of ports?

2) When a vSwitch has all its ports used, what are the symptoms to the VM? Will it show "cable not connected"? Will it show as connected, but not allow any data outbound?

Thanks

[RParker]

2) When a vSwitch has all its ports used, what are the symptons to the VM? Will it show "cable not connected"? Will it show as connected, but not allow any data outbound?

well I thought when you assigned number of ports, all that would happen is after port 25 connected, it would be unable to get an IP. Nothing will happen to your host, or cable, it's a 'soft' switch not a physical switch, so it must be based upon some threshold.

Are you absolutely sure you have a single vSwitch and ALL 28 VM's are attached to that one switch and ALL of them are currently active?

[pdrace]

In my experience any vms that are started once the port limit is reached will have the virtual nic disconnected and you can't reconnect it.

I saw this happen once during a storage move when I started up too many vms on one host.

[TomHowarth]

Further to this are you absolute certain that the vSwitch was configured with 24 ports as the default is 56

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780136083214]”. Currently available on roughcuts

[Vyker]

Are you absolutely sure you have a single vSwitch and ALL 28 VM's are attached to that one switch and ALL of them are currently active?

Yes, I am certain that I have a single vSwitch with all VM's connected, the only other I have is for VMotion.The figure of "28" is only the active VM's, I have 34 connections in total.

I have restarted my host changing the number of ports, and it all seems to be working again.

VM's where I wouldn't get any DHCP or any sort of inbound or outbound connection have now become active, and the VM's where it would show the cable as "unplugged" are now plugged back in and working!

It seems odd that A) I was able to have 4 extra ports on a vSwitch with 24 ports only, B) That the response to maximum ports is different on separate VM's

Is there an "alarm" of some sort that can be set when a vSwitch is on its way to "full" ?

Thanks for all your help, "Helpful Posts" have been marked.

[RParker]

Is there an "alarm" of some sort that can be set when a vSwitch is on its way to "full" ?

There is no warning, and this is something to identify when in your case you have many ESX hosts and many VM's, it would be difficult to manage them all.

However ESX 4.0 seems to do a much better job addressing this, as you can see from the main screen, configured switches, and how many VM's are attached to each, so that may help somewhat. It's not perfect, but maybe there is an opportunity here for someone to make an add-in to identify this.... Might be worth investigating..

[lmhealthcare]

I ran into this today. It seems the systems I just installed with ESX 4 defaulted to 24 ports. I currently has 28 machines running on those 24 with no problems. I had to move 3 other machines that wouldn't connect to the network.

This was a bit of a surprise after having 56 be the default for so long.