VDS Nic Teaming monitoring / manual Failback

[drffm]

Hello Folks,

I got a little question regarding Nic Teaming settings on a vDS and Failover/Failback monitoring:

I've configured 3 ESXi 5.5 hosts to an enterprise+ cluster using dVS as switchtype.

Each host has 2 10GE Nics, where I've set Nic 1 to be used primary for mgmt traffic/vmotkion/storage (nfs) port groups and nic 2 primary for "VM traffic" port groups.

The "VM Traffic" port groups use Nic 1 as standby adapter and the Mgmt traffic/vmotion/storage portgroups use Nic 2 as standby adapter.

I set Failback in each of the Portgroups to "No" to prevent failback to previously failed switches with lights-on, although they're not fully operational again.

Question 1: Is there any way to trigger a failback manually without having to reconfigure the teaming settings of each port group or rebooting the host? (Using the Perl SDK would be preferred). The only way I can think of is to use PowerCLI to Get & Set the Nic Teaming Settings fo every port group.

Question 2: Is there any easy way to monitor which portgroup/vm/vmk uses which Nic to detect if a failover has happened? (using vsish or similar)

I know the manual way using esxtop -> "n", but I can't figure out how to poll this info using a script. The esxtop batch mode does not seem to include nic distribution details.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

drffm

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Anything you can do in PowerCLI you can do using the Perl SDK, so yes there is a way. Perhaps you should use the vMA as one method to use the Perl SDK as it is on the vMA and you can also use esxtop remotely or esxcfg remotely to determine the state of the NICs.

The failover action would also cause a reconfigure port group (and possibly the same for the DVS) alarm to possibly be thrown for the failover. You can setup an alarm to do an action when that occurred. I would use vCenter to detect such failures.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010, 2011,2012,2013,2014

Author of the books 'VMWare ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2011 Pearson Education. 'VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment', Copyright 2009 Pearson Education.

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