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yaapu
Contributor
Contributor

iSCSI multipathing on multiple VLANs big packet loss

Hi everybody,

after setting up a 2 host cluster with vlans, iscsi and multipathing on esx 4.0 I'm loosing packets from within the service console and my vms.

VMs and the service console can ping each other fine, but if I ping outside of the vSwitch I loose packets up to 25%/30%

Do you have any clues?

My setup is as follows:

- 2 IBM x3650M2

- 1 EMC AX150 iSCSI SAN

- 2 HP 1800 switches with 24 Gb ports.

I have esx 4 build 164009 on both hosts.

The x3650s have 2 NICs each, connected on both switches on trunk ports.

I have 3 VLANs:

- VLAN 10 for the VM Network,

- VLAN 20 for the 1st port of the SP on the AX150

- VLAN 30 for the 2nd port of the SP on the AX150

Each esx host has 1 vSwitch with both NICs assigned and 5 PortGroups

- 1 for the VM on VLAN 10,

- 1 VMKernel (vmk1) for iSCSI on SP-port1on VLAN 20 (subnet 172.16.1.0)

- 1 VMKernel (vmk2) for iSCSI on SP-port2 on VLAN 30 (subnet 172.20.1.0)

- 1 VMKernel (vmk0) for vmotion, nfs, fault tolerance on VLAN 10 (subnet 192.168.100.0)

- 1 Service Console on VLAN 10 (subnet 192.168.100.0)

As per vsphere iSCSI multipathing docs vmk1 only uses vmnic0 and vmk2 only uses vmnic1

I assigned vmk1 and vmk2 to the iSCSI adapter and after a rescan I could see both paths to my AX150 as active/active most recentely used

Thanks a lot

Alessandro Apostoli

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yaapu
Contributor
Contributor

Update:

- switching the VM network adapter type from flexible to vmxnet3 solved the issue on Windows XP

- same thing on ubuntu server 8, adapter from flexible to e1000 and no more packet losses

- win 2003 server seems "unaffected" since the default adapter type is e1000

now what would happen if a migrate an 3.x VM with a flexible adapter to esx 4 ?

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