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lansley2000
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vMotion fails at 9% - Source host cannot connect to destination host

Hi,

I wonder if anyone could shine any light on why vmotion fails to occur between an ESXi host that has just been restarted, in order to test HA. I have the following setup:

3 x ESXi5 DL360 G7s with two 4 way NICs

VSphere Vcenter 5

1 x Cluster configured for HA DRS

2 x Procurve 2910-24G

The switches are not connected to each other.

Both switches are configured as such:

1894901.png

All ports are untagged. NO STP, no routing

Each hosts vMotion vSwitch is connected to both switches by 1 x 1Gb nic

I have configured a vswitch on each host for vMotion. There are two vmkernel ports with two ip addresses in the same subnet. There are two vmnics attached to the vSwitch. On each port,  one Vmic is set to be active whilst the other is set to unused. I have enabled jumbo frames both on the vSwitch and the 2910 switches. A vlan has been configured on both 2910 swicthes for vmotion with jumbo frames and traffic set to ‘untagged’. I can successfully vmkping all vmotion ip’s on all ESXi hosts. However, when I test HA by shutting down an ESXi host, when I restart the ESXi host I am unable to vmotion to that ESXi host. When I test vmkping I find that the restarted host can only vmkping itself and no other host can vmkping it. The attempted vmotion fails on 9% and errors with the source host cannot connect to the destination host. If I restart both the 2910 switches I can then carry out a vMotion and the vmkping is successful.

Please help?

Thanks

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lansley2000
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Thanks Richard.I'll try this out this morning and let you know the results

Simon

Sent from my HTC

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lansley2000
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Hi Guys

I have found the solution to my vMotion issue that affected vMotion capability after rebooting an ESXi host.

If you select properties of the vSwitch responsible for vMotion and change the load balancing from 'Route based on originating virtual port ID' to 'Route based on IP hash' you can then vmkping other hosts vMotion ip's and carry out a Live migration

I didn't have to connect the two switches in order to get this to work

A big thank you goes out to Richard for trying to help

Cheers

Simon

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rickardnobel
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lansley2000 wrote:

I have found the solution to my vMotion issue that affected vMotion capability after rebooting an ESXi host.

If you select properties of the vSwitch responsible for vMotion and change the load balancing from 'Route based on originating virtual port ID' to 'Route based on IP hash' you can then vmkping other hosts vMotion ip's and carry out a Live migration

Hello Simon, I still don't think this is the right way. You could only select "IP hash" if both outgoing interfaces from a host are connected to the same physical switch and you have configured a static link aggregation on the physical switch, (called "trunk" on your HP switches.) Since this is not the case the setup is unsupported, and while it might work at the moment it has a high risk of failure later on and I would very much recommend against keeping it in production.

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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lansley2000
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Hi Richard,

I've since read up on the various load balacing options and can see that your method is preferred over the 'ip hash' method

I'll make the change back to 'port based' and link the two switches

Thanks

Simon

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rickardnobel
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lansley2000 wrote:

I've since read up on the various load balacing options and can see that your method is preferred over the 'ip hash' method

I'll make the change back to 'port based' and link the two switches

Hello Simon, I think that is a good option to do, since the IP Hash load balancing is a bit special and really demands that both interfaces connects to the same physical switch, which also must have some specific configuration. Report back if you like with the results after the new changes.

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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lansley2000
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Hi Richard,

You were right. I configured a new VSphere system on a second site and joined the two switches for vMotion and hey presto!

Thanks again

Simon

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rickardnobel
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Nice to see it worked out fine for you and thanks for reporting back!

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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