Nic teaming not working

[m0ther]

Hi,

I'm having problems with nic teaming.

I have an ESX 3.0.1 server with two nics that I am trying team. Each connection is going into a separate physical switch. All the physical connections have been verified. I know the nics are both ok because if I configure them separately as individual service consoles they both work.

It's vSwitch0, with two physical adapters, vmnic1 and vmnic0, and has a vm network and a service console. I can only ping the service console when the team is configured as failover, any other config causes me to lose the virtual center connection the ESX host.

I have a linux machine (running vmware server) on the same network, in the same setup with bonded interfaces and it's working as expected.

Is there anything simple I could be missing as far as ESX config? I mean, this is supposed to be easy!

Thanks,

Curtis.

[Monoman]

exactly. If you have enough stackwise cables to loop around switch failures and multiple ethernet paths for connectivity out of the stack.

[mike_laspina]

I was working with a nic teaming problem that revealed something that made me re-think the connectivity issues of LACP in failed modes. I had a 3Com PXE server that statically registered it's resolved arp entries which is a no no. This created a senario in which when DCHP expired the ip could be used by a new MAC. When this occurred the PXE server could not resolve a return path to any ip mapped to the old static one.

This same thing will occur for a short duration in a switch failure event because the local dynamic arp entry will be used initially from the host and the switches will try to forward to the last known MAC address in the switch tables.

The command arp -d * cleared the issue.

This may help out when trouble shooting...