Problems with Vmotion after adding 4th host

[jeremy_sunshine]

Hi all,

I am starting to have a problem with Vmotions now that I have added a 4th host to my setup. (gets to 10%, times out)

Our setup is slightly unique, so let me explain it: I have four HP blades ( 2 BL465, 2 BL495) running esx 3.5 update 5, build 238493. they each have four NICs, two are dedicated to client network traffic, and have real IPs, while two are dedicated to Vmotion use, and have non-routable (192.168.10.x) IPs. Only the Non-routable Vswitch has a VMkernel port. While the Client ports are configured with a vanilla virtual connect network, the non-routable network doesn't have any external ports, i.e. it exists only on the backplane of the bladesystem, in between the the four blades. an additional challenge is that we do not have control over our (Windows active directory integrated) DNS servers, and cannot register the hosts with DNS. since you must have DNS resolution for Vmotion, i've put each host in every other host's DNS host file.

My question is this: I used the real IPs for the host files, and i'm wondering if that could be the problem. Do I need to use the non-routable, Vmotion network IPs for the host file? Even better, is it possible to put both IPs in the host file? If so, is there any special syntax required?

Thanks for any help provided.

[weinstein5]

VMotion does not use the host names - it uses the IP address assigned to the vmkernel port enabled for vmotion. So you should use the real IP address assigned to the Service Console port of your ESx hosts.

Are you still able to vmotion between the original 3 hosts? Since your relying on the internal networking of the blade chasis I would look there first - vmotion stopping at 10% is typically a problem with the vmotion network - problems with IP addressing, network connectivity or the like. Are you able to use the vmkping commend from the console and ping all of the vmotion IP address?.

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[jeremy_sunshine]

I'm aware that VMotion doesn't use the hostnames for communication, but my understanding was that it won't let you enable it without hostnames being resolveable between the hosts, for some reason.

as for your other questions, I'll give the vmkping a try. I can Vmotion between all the hosts, but it takes several tries. the problem is intermitent.

[jguzmanr]

I saw something similar once and it was a duplicate IP. Re-IP the vmotion for the fourth host, and ping the old ip. to see if you get a response.

[jeremy_sunshine]

got it fixed all, was unable to to vmkping one of the VMKernel interfaces, I had to delete and recreate it to fix the problem.