vWAAS and vPATH (Nexus v1000) - issues in implementation

[mmcgregor]

Hi,

Working with our Cisco SC, we are trialling vWAAS acceleration of Citrix traffic on UCS environment and using vPATH on Nexus 1000v to redirect traffic to the vWAAS accelerator.

We have previous experience with WAAS physical devices, but first time deployment of vWAAS.

Are getting Intercepted Packets dropped and CRC error failures  on packets from vWAAS. As per the below output. Can anyone shed any light on how to troubleshoot this as it is all soft devices (vWAAS and Nexus v1000 and end servers are also VMs on service ports where VPath command is applied).

vb-msl-vwaas-01#sh stat vn-service vpath

VPATH Statistics

*****************

Packet Statistics

-----------------

                                     VPATH Enabled = YES

                             VPATH Packet received = 169411

              Optimized TCP Packets VPATH returned = 48952

              WAAS Bypassed VPATH packets returned = 56117

VPATH encapsulated IP pkts(excluding TCP) returned = 43790

        VPATH encapsulated Non-IP packets returned = 22280

                          VPATH Fragments received = 0

                          VPATH Fragments returned = 0

  VPATH Packets returned when VPATH not configured = 0

                        Non-VPATH Packets received = 51691606

Error Statistics

-----------------

                 VPATH intercepted packets dropped = 22450

                         VPATH Packet CRC failures = 22450

            VPATH packets with unsupported Version = 0

             VPATH packets with wrong request type = 0

          VPATH packets with wrong destination MAC = 0

[Ivan Kovacevic]

Troubleshooting Virtual Appliances is not that different than troubleshooting real ones. Here we need to see the packets "on the wire" to see what exactly is wrong with them. In a virtual environment with N1K this is even easier to do.

You can clone a new VM and install wireshark on it. Then SPAN the port on N1K where vWAAS is connected to the N1K port where your new cloned VM with Wireshark will capture the packets. Then we can see the vPath encapsulated packets and see what is wrong with them.

We have already seen these kind of issues with vWAAS and there a couple of bugs there with various combinations of settings, so we should first know the following:

- N1k version

- vWAAS version

- ESX version

- which NIC types are used (e1000, vmxnet3...) on vWAAS and invovled VMs

Cheers,

Ivan