I have ESXi 3.5 installed on a Dell PowerEdge server with one physical NIC. I have I have several Ubuntu 8.0.4 servers. I added a further two hosts running the firewall distro pfSense in a load balancing/high availability mode. To do this, I needed to enable promiscuous mode on the Virtual MAchine Port Group.
However, after doing this, I am finding that any SSH connections that I make to any of the existing hosts, are disconnected 3 minutes. When I switch off promiscuous mode everything goes back to normal and I have a sustained SSH connection. Put it back on again, I have 3 minutes before it disconnects with the message
" Read from remote host <ip.address.of.the.virtual.machine>: Connection reset by peer"
On the client side, I get this message: "Read error from remote host <ip.address.of.my.pc: Connection timed out.
Any ideas why SSH is affected by promiscuous mode being set on the switch?
Thanks
Update: I switched off the firewall VM's and now find that the virtual switches can be set to promiscuous mode and I can sustan my SSH connections with my linux VM's. (Note that these VM's were not configured to use the firewalls I was setting up and had their own NICs so I could connect to them directly.)
This suggests that there is a problem with SSH on ESXi whenever there are hosts on the network which do multicasting, as pfSense does between the firewalls for load balancing and high availability.
