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CraigV75
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VCSA died & cannot connect to VDS

Hi All,

Got an issue here. I worked on the new VCSA I put into what will become a new VM environment yesterday, and tested movements of VMs between the old and new environments successfully.


Came into work this morning and couldn't log on. I had to log directly onto the ESXi host and open the console of the VCSA where I saw it seemed to have lost it's IP address and domain details. Tried to set this in the DCUI a couple of times, then via the command line, and finally once more on the DCUI where it "took". However, I was still unable to browse to the name/IP through a browser, and couldn't ping the IP. I checked on the HA I had configured and this never cut over either.

As such, I had to restart and deleted everything. Redeployed the VCSA successfully, checked it out on the console and it could accept and retain all the network settings. However, on trying to re-add it to the VDS, it came up with the error below:

Addition or reconfiguration of network adapters attached to non-ephemeral distributed virtual port groups (Lvr_Agg4.102) is not supported.

I have tried to remove a NIC from the Management network on the VDS, but it won't allow me too. I am essentially stuck, and while this particular environment is still in project phase, I need it running soon in order to continue. All VMs currently on the VDS (and they're for testing purposes) are accessible.

Any assistance would be great.

Thanks,


Craig

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CraigV75
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Hi All,

Thanks very much for the advice, but I ended up defaulting all 4 hosts and reconfiguring from scratch.

What I would like to know when it comes to setting up the networking is whether or not to place Management traffic on the VDS or simply keep it separate on a host by creating a vSwitch for this, whilst moving VM traffic & vMotion to the VDS?

Thanks!

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msripada
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If vCenter is down, vCenter as a virtual machine cannot get the network connectivity but the IP address should not be lost on the VCSA. You can try to create a new standard switch on the ESXi host and change the VCSA network adapter to the standard switch portgroup (advised to be on same vlan as per the same config in VDS) to get it on network. Once vcenter is back on network and services started, you can try to switch it back to VDS. If VDS portgroup is static, then it would not get the network when rebooted or restarted.

Thanks,

MS

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Yuva_1990
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I would like to clarify few thing here

1.I understand that we have redeployed VCSA did we restore the old database from the previous appliance where dv switch is configured

2.If we have deployed the VCSA without restoring the database DVS configuration will not be there in the new appliance so we have reconfigure everything from scratch

CraigV75
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I see that I now have to reconfigure this all. How do I delete the VDS then if I managed to get the hosts onto another temporary vCenter? I have tried to delete it, but obviously vmk0 (management) is in use. I also removed vmnic2 from the management team and it's not showing up.

Or do I need to remove the test VMs from the cluster, put the disk in and restart the config that way?

Thanks!

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Yuva_1990
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Hi Craig

You can log in to the host using ssh and use the below commands to delete the management interface using  the below commands

  • On a vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS), delete an existing VMkernel port using this command:
esxcli network ip interface remove --interface-name=vmkX

Note: The vmk interface number used for management can be determined by running the esxcli network ip interface list command.

After the unreachable vmkernel port has been removed, it can be recreated on a Standard Switch.

CraigV75
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This was one of my issues...I couldn't get a standard vSwitch or portgroup back. Wouldn't allow it and kept on giving errors.

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CraigV75
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Hi Yuva,

Tried and couldn't do this.

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CraigV75
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Hi All,

Thanks very much for the advice, but I ended up defaulting all 4 hosts and reconfiguring from scratch.

What I would like to know when it comes to setting up the networking is whether or not to place Management traffic on the VDS or simply keep it separate on a host by creating a vSwitch for this, whilst moving VM traffic & vMotion to the VDS?

Thanks!

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Yuva_1990
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Hi Craig

Thanks for the response.We can create a dv portgroup using ephermal mode which would allows us modify the nic settings directly from the ESXI host if the Vcenter server is down

Reference KB article

VMware Knowledge Base

Regards

Yuvaraj