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tascheHyaene
Contributor
Contributor

Missing virtual switches?

Good morning everyone,

I recently discovered something on the VI3 that I support that has me a bit puzzled. I recently upgraded to vCenter's latest and its two ESX servers to u4. Everything appears to be working properly; vMotion is working, HA is config'd to where vCenter likes it, etc.

The vCenter client reports the four NICs configured and their respective virtual switches:

1 & 2 - VM network, mgmt console, vmkernel (for iSCSI, not configured for vMotion)

3 - vmkernel for vMotion (servers connected directly to one another on a 192.168.x.x)

4 - VM network

However, when I console in to the ESX servers, neither of them sees the virtual switches running the vMotion or the 2nd VM network (on the 4th NIC). That is, if i run a esxcfg-vswif -l, the ESX servers only report the 1st virtual switch.

This doesn't look right to me, but vMotion's working and the VM's on the 2nd virtual switch are all connecting, getting DHCP, etc.

Also, on a closer look it appears that attempting to place one of the servers in Maintenance Mode does not work - the process starts and then hangs at 2%.

Any help or insight would be immensely appreciated.

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Amnexi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The "missing vSwitches" issue is very strange... All I can say is to try esxcfg-vswif -l too, maybe you'll see something strange with the Service Console, but I don't know...

Regarding the not-entering manteinance mode problem, it's maybe related with this known issue (😞

  • Virtual Machine Migrations Are Not Recommended When the ESX Server Host Is Entering the Maintenance or Standby Mode
    VMware HA will not recommend or perform(when in fully automated mode)
    virtual machine migrations off of a host entering maintenance or
    standby mode, if the VMware HA failover level would be violated after
    the host enters the requested mode. This restriction applies whether
    strict HA admission control is enabled or not.

If you have a heavy loaded cluster, you're maybe violating the admission control (check it out)

Regards

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tascheHyaene
Contributor
Contributor

The cluster is far from operating under load.

I moved all of the VMs manually via vMotion to another server, and it bounced into Maintenance Mode no problem. It's the automated part that's not working.

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