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cjeffcoatjr
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ESXi 5.5 VMs cannot ping in or out.

Hello! I have been trying to figure this out for a few days to no avail, perhaps one of you could shed some light on the situation:

For reference, I would consider myself competent with computing and networking in general, but not really with VMWare. We have an old Dell PowerEdge R510 that we are re-deploying for VMWare. The end goal is to have three DCs and Alienvault​ successfully up and running.

I installed the 5.5 Update 3 image (the latest supported for the R510, and it works since we already have a 5.5 license from long ago) from Dell smoothly, set up the management network, gave it a hostname, made an entry in DNS, navigated to the hostname: Great, things are smooth. I fired up vSphere and did the same. I set up networking next. We have three VLANs (10, 20, and 30), one for each of our businesses. So, I added those three VLANs in the form of port groups to the default vSwitch. I also added the second NIC that is on our server to the vSwitch and plugged it in, as I found in this best practice guide (page 16). I then attempted to deploy Alienvault first. I attached each NIC on Alienvault to the second VLAN, 20, as this the main business. Fired up the VM, and network conenctivity failed: Great, things are not smooth. I am much more versed in Windows than any other OS, so I created a test Server 2k12 VM. After lots of troubleshooting these are my findings:

When on VLAN 0 or 4095 the test VM can ping ESXi (also on 0 or 4095), but nothing else.

When on any other VLAN, the test VM cannot ping ESXi (neither on 0 or 4095), nor anything else.

In my week of testing, never once have I been able to successfully ping any other machine: Gateway, DNS, another machine on the same subnet: nothing.

All of the testing above was done with valid static IPs in the network and not DHCP. I should note though, that DHCP pulled a 169.xxx address 100% of the time it was in use.

Originally I saw on Google that people have been successful in trying to install 6.7 on this generation of servers (apparently the R710 is a staple in the homelab?), so that was my first course of action. I successfully installed 6.7 and did everything I did above (with the free version, not licensed like our 5.5 is), but to no avail. I thought it was likely a hardware incompatibility issue somewhere since 6.7 is not supported on our server, so that is when I went the 5.5 route, also to no avail.

What am I missing? I have tried practically everything I can think of, including isolating the test machine to it's own vSwitch with the second NIC attached to it.

Below I have attached a screenshot of my networking tab in vSphere, more can be provided if necessary.

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cjeffcoatjr
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We finally solved the issue, it was a switching problem. The solution was also staring us in the face: VMware Knowledge Base.

That port configuration worked like a charm. Not sure how I did not find this before. Thanks for your help.

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3 Replies
ThompsG
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Hi cjeffcoatjr,

Can you provide the network configuration for the physical ports the ESXi Server is connected to?

Also can you confirm that you get no network comms between two VMs connected to the same portgroup? Make sure that you have the required firewall rules enabled to allow ICMP (disabled by default) before testing.

Kind regards.

cjeffcoatjr
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Unfortunately, I cannot give the switch configuration, as the network admin will not give me access to it (I am just an intern), and is convinced that it is not a switch issue (we have a working ESXi 6.5 server on the same subnet in the same switch with portgroups setup the same way that is working fine. When I started this project a week ago, this is the server that I looked at and attempted to copy, rule for rule and group for group.).

Moreover, I cannot seem to find where I would enable ICMP in the vSphere firewall screen, and two test machines in the same subnet (aaa.bbb.ccc.51 and aaa.bbb.ccc.52) cannot ping each-other.

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cjeffcoatjr
Contributor
Contributor
Jump to solution

We finally solved the issue, it was a switching problem. The solution was also staring us in the face: VMware Knowledge Base.

That port configuration worked like a charm. Not sure how I did not find this before. Thanks for your help.

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Was it helpful? Let us know by completing this short survey here.