2 node vSAN Direct Connect no pings???? Please help!!

[lbomb]

I have 2 Dell R710's directly connected with 2 crossover cables in NIC 3 & NIC 4.  I have a 2 node VSAN 6.5 configuration with a Virtual Witness Appliance.  I have VMK3 tagged for vSAN traffic on both hosts with static IP's set from my main subnet, and both nics have green link lights and show to be connected. 

Here's the issue - I get multiple alerts when running VSAN health check and apparently the two hosts can not ping each other... even though they are directly connected.  I've been beating my head against the wall for 3 days trying to figure this out.  PLEASE HELP!

[a_p_]

I have 2 Dell R710's directly connected with 2 crossover cables in NIC 3 & NIC 4.

If I understand you correctly these two nics are used for vmk3?

With the cross-over connecting this may only work if vmk3 uses the same vmnic on both hosts, which is not necessarily the case.

To find out whether the cross-over setup causes the issue, remove one cross-over cable, so that each ESXi host fails over to the remaining vmnic.

André

[TheBobkin]

Hello lbomb​

Check as André advised, but I would advise using Active/Standby for vSAN traffic in general aswell.

Can you check the MTU of the vSwitch Vs vmk interfaces to make sure these are consistent?

Check the unicast agent lists on each hosts also

VMware Knowledge Base

Bob

[wowvmsupport]

I had faced similar issue and what i found is packet from source leaves on one nic and returns on another linlk and that is the issue ,so in port group make one link are active and second link as standby and servers started pinging each other via Direct connect.