Czernobog's Posts

- have to repost this, since yesterday the new great forum software did not seem to save the thread... - I am managing a small NSX-T test environment, consisting of 3 ESXi hosts as transport nodes and an overlay transport zone, where a few overlay networks are configured. The hosts have 4 x 1Gbps physical uplinks (no switches with 10gb available atm...), two connected to the vds, the rest to the n-vds. The Uplink profile applied to the ESXi Hosts uses both n-vds uplinks in a LB configuration. It uses the global MTU configuration setting of MTU = 1600. 2 Edge Transport nodes are grouped in an Edge Cluster. On the edges, uplink-1 is connected to the transport vlan for the overlay networks, uplinks 2 and 3 are used for communication with the physical switches. There is almost no load on the environment currently, be it compute, storage or network. The edge nodes are deployed in the Medium sizing configuration. The problem I am facing is, that transfer rates between vms placed on the vds in a physical vlan and VMs placed in the overlay network are extremely bad. I can only get something needing low thorughput, like SSH, to work, but during file transfers using SSH or HTTP I get as low as 30kB/s before loosing the connection. Using performance views from the vcenter I did not notice any packet drops neither on the hosts' vmnics nor the VMs' nic. Ping between components returns roundtrip times of <1 ms. Transfer rates between VMs inside the overlay network are fine, even when they are placed on different ESXi hosts in the cluster. I've also tried different source systems from the physical VLAN to do the transfer tests. All VMs placed in the overlay, regardles of the ESXi host, seem to be affected. Transfers between systems placed in VLANs on the vds are not negatively affected either. All switchports connecting the transport nodes are configured consistenlty in regards of VLAN trunks, MTU size being 9216 bytes. I've used https://spillthensxt.com/how-to-validate-mtu-in-an-nsx-t-environment/ as a guideline to check for MTU consistency across all components and could not find an issue. I use 1600 on the vds and as a default value on the nsx-t uplink profiles used on the transport nodes as well as the edge nodes. I'm kind of at a loss here what to troubleshoot next, and any tips are most welcome:)

I am managing a small NSX-T test environment, consisting of 3 ESXi hosts as transport nodes and an overlay transport zone, where a few overlay networks are configured. The hosts have 4 x 1Gbps physical uplinks (no switches with 10gb available atm...), two connected to the vds, the rest to the n-vds. The Uplink profile applied to the ESXi Hosts uses both n-vds uplinks in a LB configuration. It uses the global MTU configuration setting of MTU = 1600. 2 Edge Transport nodes are grouped in an Edge Cluster. On the edges, uplink-1 is connected to the transport vlan for the overlay networks, uplinks 2 and 3 are used for communication with the physical switches. There is almost no load on the environment currently, be it compute, storage or network. The edge nodes are deployed in the Medium sizing configuration. The problem I am facing is, that transfer rates between vms placed on the vds in the physical vlan network and VMs placed in the overlay network are extremely bad. I can only get something needing low thorughput, like SSH, to work, but during file transfers using SSH or HTTP I get as low as 30kB/s before loosing the connection. Using performance views from the vcenter I did not notice any packet drops neither on the hosts' vmnics nor the VMs' nic. Ping between components returns roundtrip times of <1 ms. Transfer rates between VMs inside the overlay network are fine, even when they are placed on different ESXi hosts in the cluster. I've also tried different source systems from the physical VLAN to do the transfer tests. All VMs placed in the overlay, regardles of the ESXi host, seem to be affected. Transfers between systems placed in VLANs on the vds are not negatively affected either. All switchports connecting the transport nodes are configured consistenlty in regards of VLAN trunks, MTU size being 9216 bytes. I've used https://spillthensxt.com/how-to-validate-mtu-in-an-nsx-t-environment/ as help and check for MTU consistency acrros all components and could not find an issue. I use 1600 on the vds and as a default value on the nsx-t uplink profiles used on the transport nodes as well as the edge nodes. I'm kind of at a loss here what to troubleshoot next, and any tips are most welcome:)

Last week I wanted to migrate workloads from the N-VDS to the VDS7, following a vSphere 7 upgrade. The ESXi hosts in my test environment have 4 NICs each, the initial configuraton was vmnic0 + vmnic1 on vds, vmnic2 + vmnic3 on n-vds. The migration and new uplink assignment was done successfully, at least I did not find an error in the uplink profile configuration of the transport nodes. First the vmnic0 and vmnic1 were used in the profile, after the new vmkernels were online I have assigned the hosts vmnic2 and vmnic3 to the vds. What immedietally became obvious was, that the overlay tunnel status switched to degraded. Falling back to the n-vds configuration remediated the issue. I have checked my configuration and looked for clues in the documentation, but could not find a solution. Finally I came upon this blog post, where the summary explains the behaviour well: "So when you're using and N-VDS or VDS for NSX-T and you're placing an Edge on the same switch you have to put the Edge overlay in a different subnet. The Geneve traffic that originates from the Edge is not allowed to pass a switch that's hosting a tunnel endpoint for ESXi (VMK10)." Following this advice, I've created a new VDS with only one port group for the overlay traffic, and connected to vmnics of the host to its. After this, the nsx edges nic dedicated to te overlay tunnel connection was attached to this new port group, and the tunnel was re-established. This poses a problem however, because in production I have hosts with only w nics. This means, that I would have to separate the vmnics somehow between two distributed switches, which woudl resultat in a non-redundand setup. Is there a way to separate the overlay and endpoint traffic while still placing all vmkernels on the same VDS?

I run an environment where NSX-V 6.4.8 is deployed. For some time now I am preparing to move to NSX-T, which a test env running for some time now. The prod environment is constanlty expanding, but, since we plan to move to NSX-T at some point, my company hase been purchasing only NSX-T licences, not NSX-V. This leaves the prod environment with NSX-V underlicensed - for the 10 Hosts in my inventory, I have only 10 NSX-V CPU licenses, BUT I have enough NSX-T licenses to cover all the demand. This brings me to the point of this thread - the transition to NSX-T is delayed, but I do not want to leave the prod environment underlicensed. So, I want to apply my NSX-T licensing key to the NSX-V solution in the vCenter, up until I get NSX-T in production. Both NSX-V and NSX-T licenses are from the "Enterprise (Plus)" tier. When trying to do this, I get following message: From my experience, it does not *really* matter what license is applied to the NSX-V solution, hence the underlicensed state - NSX does not seem to mind. But I am afriad this time all of the listed features might be deactivated and I would have apply the NSX-V key again and recover functionality. Can anyone give a tip on how to handle this?