SAN Access - Ping returns General Failure

[stanj]

From our vCenter at I can ping our esxi servers.

I can vmkping from the ESXi Servers to vCenter.

I can also ping vCenter from my office PC.

The vCenter Server has two nics:

Nic 1 goes from the vCenter to our switch vlan 2 then to vlan 928  to allow connection out to th internet.

Nic 2 goes from the vCenter to our switch vlan 10 which is our SAN connection at 172.16.0.10.

Yesterday, I could access the SAN Mgt Interface from my office and vCenter.

Today, I no longer can access the SAN Mgt Interface.

If I ping 172.16.0.10 (our san), I get back

“General Failure”

“General Failure”

“General Failure”

However, vCenter still can see volumes on the SAN and I can acess them via vCenter Datastore Browser

Any ideas?

thanks

[jshuron]

Can you provide a diagram with subnets only (don't need actual IP addresses)?  A general failure message is not a vaild ICMP reply, per the RFC.  If your vCenter server is a Windows server, you may want to look at the NIC driver or TCP/IP stack.

[stanj]

I can put together a diagram, but I am not sure how that would help considering this has been working for several months and now access out to the Internet fails.

Not sure what is going on.

I disabled NIC 1 that connects to VLAN 928.

This is the NIC that allows access to vCenter and allows access out to the Internet.

As soon as I disabled NIC 1, I lost my vCenter Client connection from my office PC.

I re-enabled NIC 1 and was able to use vCenter Client to connect

So, to me, it appears NIC1 is ok because I can also ping he ESXi servers

How do you check TCP/IP stack?

How can I check ICMP ?

thanks

[jshuron]

That's interesting that your receive the general failure, but don't have any other symptoms.  As far as checking the stack or ICMP, first make sure you have console access to the server.  Then what I've done in the past is uncheck Internet Protocol from the adapter, and then remove it completely.  Then reinstall TCP/IP.  Or, you could check for an updated driver for the NIC to see if that resolves the problem.

[stanj]

Our IT Dept came over and connected a sniffer to from the vCenter NIC to the switch.

When we try to query www.microsoft.com, the sniffer indicates the request is not making out to our VLAN.

However, any company IPs can be reached.

For instance, while I cannot get to www.microsoft.com,

I can get to www.jhuapl.edu