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zenking
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Automatic vmotion if Mgmt Network fails

This is probably crackpot, but the only stupid questions are the ones we don't ask, right? We have esxi 5.5 hosts with separate vswitches for management, vmotion and iscsi san connections. Each currently has 2 pnics each. We also have vCenter, HA and DRS.

We're considering pulling one pnic from the mgmt vswitch and moving it to a brand new vswitch. We're trying to decide if, in the event of mgmt network failure on one host, we could live with a brief downtime until guests get vmotioned to other hosts. What would really help is if vmotion would be triggered automatically in the event of a mgmt network failure. Is this possible?

VMWare Environment: vSphere 7.0, EQ PS6210 SANs, Dell R730 Hosts, dedicated Dell switches w/ separate vlans for vmotion and iscsi.
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a_p_
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Sorry, seems I misunderstood your question. So you plan to have two vSwitches with one uplink each, one for Management and one for the VMs!?

Unfortunately neither DRS nor HA will kick in in case the VM network goes down. You'd need to do the migration manually or scripted.

André

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a_p_
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We have esxi 5.5 hosts with separate vswitches for management, vmotion and iscsi san connections.

Where are the VM's virtual machine port groups located? On the Management vSwitch, or a separate vSwitch? A Management Network outage basically doesn't harm the host and the VMs, unless HA strikes, which - in such a case - I'd suggest you disable until you are done with the network configuration. With two pNICs in plac, and migrating them one-by-one, you shouldn't have an outage anyway.

André

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zenking
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Thanks. The VMs have public IPs in the same subnet as the mgmt network, and that vswitch has a single port group with all of the VMs. Ultimately, all of the VMs will be moving into different vlan port groups on a new vswitch. What we're trying to do is avoid introducing any new vlans configs to the vswitch with the mgmt network so that we can leg in VMs to the new vlans. If we go down to a single nic for the public network, the VMs will be fine, but obviously any user connections would be dropped.

If DRS could detect that the public network is offline and automatically vmotion all VMs on that host to another host, we could live with the brief disconnect. However, if the VMs have to wait for us to manually vmotion in that scenario, we'll probably need to keep the redundant public nics.

VMWare Environment: vSphere 7.0, EQ PS6210 SANs, Dell R730 Hosts, dedicated Dell switches w/ separate vlans for vmotion and iscsi.
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a_p_
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Sorry, seems I misunderstood your question. So you plan to have two vSwitches with one uplink each, one for Management and one for the VMs!?

Unfortunately neither DRS nor HA will kick in in case the VM network goes down. You'd need to do the migration manually or scripted.

André

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chriswahl
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Something along this idea is being added to HA in the future builds of vSphere 6. Currently, the VMCP feature (VM Component Protection) will HA restart a VM on a host with failed storage. The roadmap is to offer similar functionality to VM guest networks. It would be an outage, however, and not a vMotion.

Just food for thought.

VCDX #104 (DCV, NV) ஃ WahlNetwork.com ஃ @ChrisWahl ஃ Author, Networking for VMware Administrators
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