Multiple VMKernels and Vmotion

[1putt1der]

I have two ESX hosts in a lab environment. They are currently unlicensed and in evaluation mode. They are clustered and using a Dell MD3000i for shared storage. I have two vswitches setup on both hosts for connections to the shared storage using iscsi. For some reason I am only able to enable vmotion on one of the VMKernels at a time. For example if vmtion is enabled on vmkernel 0 and I go to vmkernel 1 and enable it on that interface it gets disabled on vmkernel0. My assumption was that for redundancy it should be able to function on both vmkernels. Is my assumption incorrect? They are setup with IP addresses on separate subnets. The network names on both ends match as well. if I unplug the cable from the vmotion enabled vswitch and attempt to vmotion a guest to that host it fails with a message saying something like a physical connection was not enabled. Any Ideas?

[Datto · Accepted solution]

For VMotion redundancy, some people create a single VSwitch that includes your VMotion port as well as your Service Console port and then put two physical NICs into that VSwitch. The one pNIC becomes the Active for your Service Console and the Standby for the VMotion. The other pNIC becomes the Active for the VMotion and the Standby for the Service Console.

Once you put the two pNICs into the VSwitch and setup your Service Console and VMotion port, if you click on Properties of the VSwitch and then highlight say VMotion and click edit and then go to the NIC Teaming tab, you'll see a checkbox for Override vSwitch Failover Order. If you check that checkbox, you'll be able to set an Active pNic and set a Standby pNIC. Do the same then with your Service Console NIC Teaming only do the reverse order of the pNICs.

Of course, that all assumes you can do this with your physical network to accommodate the pairing of Active and Standby NICs.

Datto

Message was edited by: Datto about ports and portgroups to make it more clear.