I have a home lab setup with a single SG300-20 (firmware 1.4.1.3, L3 mode) connected to a server with 4 NICs running ESXi 6.0. I have a number of virtual machines running ESXi 6.0 (nested ESXi). Because the nested ESXi hosts are connected by a virtual switch on the physical ESXi host normally (unicast) traffic between these virtual machines does not need to go to the physical switch (SG300). This version of vSAN has a requirement for multicast. There is a test built-in to vSAN for multicast that indicates all is not well. I have experimented with different settings on the switch (enabling/disabling IGMP snooping and querier) which changes the results of this test. I have a dedicated VLAN and subnet exclusively for VLAN traffic. The best results seem to be when both IGMP snooping and IGMP querier are both enabled.
One thing I have done on the nested ESXi hosts is add add a static route for the multicast address (224.2.3.4) to the network interface (vmk4) dedicated to vSAN[1]:
Network Netmask Gateway Interface Source
------- ------- ------- --------- ------
default 0.0.0.0 10.1.4.1 vmk0 MANUAL
10.1.4.0 255.255.255.0 0.0.0.0 vmk0 MANUAL
10.1.6.0 255.255.255.0 0.0.0.0 vmk1 MANUAL
10.1.7.0 255.255.255.0 0.0.0.0 vmk2 MANUAL
10.1.9.0 255.255.255.0 0.0.0.0 vmk4 MANUAL
224.2.3.4 255.255.255.255 10.1.9.0 vmk4 MANUAL
This didn't seem to make much of a difference. Having read the section on Multicasting in "Cisco_300Sx_v1_4_AG.pdf" I'm still not sure what, if any, changes I should be making to the SG300. I really don't know multicasting, so I'm kinda stuck.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
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[1] vSAN Multicast performance test fails (2135495)
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2135495
... which lead me to section "Multicast performance test of Virtual SAN health check does not run on Virtual SAN network " ...
VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 Release Notes
http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vsan/61/vmware-virtual-san-61-release-notes.html#knownissues
