Why will vMotion work with a DHCP IP, but not a static IP?

[ksagona]

I've got a bit of a puzzler. I'm trying to set up vMotion on our new blades. They're running VMWare ESX 4.0.0, 208167. I've set up the VMkernel on a seperate vSwitch. When I try to use a static IP, I get various errors about the connection being reset by the peer, or that it failed to send pre-copy start message to remote host, or that it failed to receive bytes from the remote host.

However, if all I do is go to the VMkernel and switch from a static IP to DHCP under the IP settings tab, everything runs smoothly. And, as far as I can tell, everything is the exact same, except for the last digits of the IP number (static IP is 10.11.129.148, DHCP is 10.11.129.64). The subnet mask appears the same, and the default gateway appears the same. Just those last digits fail.

DHCP always appears to pick up the same IPs for the blades, so I'm just a bit puzzled as to why the last digit would make a big difference if there is no other device on the network with that IP.

Thank you!

Keith

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

It absolutely doesn't matter DHCP or static IP. If static IP adrresses do not wor the you should check all your settings, and especially check for duplicate IPs.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[ksagona]

Thanks. That's what I'm thinking too. I ran esxcfg-vmknic -l and esxcfg-route -l to see if I could see any other major differences, but I couldn't. Is there another command that would show any differences?

[AntonVZhbankov]

First of all ask your network administrator for correct settings and then just enter it.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[ksagona]

Thanks. I asked, and had to enter the records in our DNS. It may not have propagated yet, but that didn't work either so far, but I plan to check agan tomorrow morning. Still working on it...it's got to be something really small that I'm missing.

[ksagona]

Yep, that's what it looks like it was. Two of my three servers had duplicate IPs to other machines on the network. I switched to three new static IPs, and so far, that seems to work beautifully. Thank you for your help!

[AntonVZhbankov]

Glad to hear that problem is solved finally.

If you see something strange with network and all settings are fine - always check for duplicate IPs.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru