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beckhamk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Netflow in ESX4? what happened?

Does anyone know where the experimental support for netflow went in ESX 4?

Currently vmkload_mod netflow no longer finds this module.

thanks in advance

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howie
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

It is not currently in ESX 4. It was experimental in 3.5 at the first place so hopefully this is not a regression for you? Thanks.

beckhamk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Is this going to be brought back? Sheeez storage motion was experimental and that didnt go away lol. Actaully the netflow worked extreamly well and we used it to easily track and filter bandwidth based on ip.

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howie
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Are you using it for productiion? I cannot talk about our roadmap on this public forum obviously, but if there are lots of people's life is depending on netflow, it does not hurt for me to know. Smiley Happy Thanks again!

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beckhamk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We used it for production to assist us in keeping track of bandwidth and billing clients accordingly. It worked well.

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beovax
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We use this in production as well. I hope VMware are not going to now force us to implement cisco nexus 100v vswitches to use what we could use before??

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beovax
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

just found this link and netflow is still experimental in ESX4 standard vsphere vswitches?

http://www.vmware.com/products/vnetwork-distributed-switch/features.html

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beckhamk
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thats great! If we could only find out how to run the netflow setup again. The old way doesnt appear to work.

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beovax
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Just tried the 3.5 instruction on our ESX4 host - cannot find netflow module. Come on VMware I know it was always experimental, but I have a feeling we are going to get shafted here for some more cash to use this feature. The sales blurb says it is still experimental - so where is it??

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howie
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

1) I'm sorry but we don't have netflow experimental support. I will check with the doc people.

2) Drop me a private message if you actually use netflow in production in ESX 3.5 and would love to discuss with you.

Thanks,

-howie

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howie
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

1) I'm sorry but we don't have netflow experimental support. I will check with the doc people.

2) Drop me a private message if you actually use netflow in 3.5 and would love to discuss with you.

Thanks,

-howie

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HyperViZor
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I use ESX 3.5's NetFlow in my production environment, and I must say that it's been extremely useful for us. Knowing that it is no longer available in ESX 4.0 is quite frustrating since I'm upgrading to vSphere soon.

The only workaround I can see now is to use Cisco 1000V's NetFlow, but it means in the same time more costs for using the Enterprise-Plus and NX1V.

I made a complete tutorial for the Netflow use on my blog:

Hany Michael

HyperViZor.com | Virtualization, and everything around it

Hany Michael
HyperViZor.com | The Deep Core of The Phenomena
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beovax
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Just to add, we have no control of the upstream switches as the servers are colocated. They only informatio we really need is the total bandwidth used for eached VM. Not too worried about the protocols used. I wonder if any third parties could produce a plugin that records neftlow without the massive payout for the cisco 1000v??

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beovax
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Can we all get to gether and beat VMware with a big stick until they bring this feature back. Upgrading my standalone hosts to enterprise plus and then buy a cisco N1000v is not an option!!

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chertel
Contributor
Contributor

In 3.5 there was also the possibility to get the traffic values by requesting it from snmpd, but the snmpd in vsphere does not supply these values anymore (according to the new MIBs, they were "obsolete" or "not implemented"), so we are also looking for another possibility to get the virtual machines's traffic values...

Netflow would be very nice, so please implement it, VMware Smiley Happy

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beovax
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

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