I have a Cisco UCS Blade Chassis with 5 blades running ESXi 4.1. The chassis is connected to a pair of 6120 interconnects, and the interconnects are connected to our 6509e core router/switch.
Im running 2 Windows 2008 R2 Ent servers for my guest OS. They both have 2 NICs assigned to them using the VMXNET3 adapters. The first nic is the production NIC used for normal network access to the servers. The second is a NLB nic which is specifically for use with the NLB built into windows. The prod NIC is connected to a port group called 42-PROD-NET on my vSwitch, and has the following properties:
The NLB NIC is connected to a port group called 42-NLB-NET on the same vSwitch with the following properties:
My problem is that I can't access anything over the NLB port group. It was half working before i changed the "Notify Switches" option to No as recommended by a VMware article I found regarding using NLB in unicast mode on vSphere. It was working on some computers in our network, but not from others. There reason was because the 2 VMs were on different hosts and that isnt supported. So when I moved the virtual machines to the same host, and changed the Notify Switches to No on the NLB port group (which was how the VMware article said to do it), now there are no computers in the network that can access the NIC on the NLB port group. I feel like im overlooking something simple, but I don't know what it is. If anyone has any ideas on what could be the issue, or has experience in using NLB in unicast mode on vSphere, I'd greatly appreciate the help as I'm about to pull my hair out!