Issues with ESXi over UCS

[SacoPablo]

Hello All,

Hopefully someone can help me understand what am I doing wrong here because I don't know what

else to try by now, basically I've an ESXi cluster running on UCS, the UCS is connected to our 2 N5K (Cisco Nexus) with vPC, on the Nexus side the trunk has the default cisco configuration therefore it is allowing all vlans. What I need to do is add a new VM that needs to communicate with 3 vlans not previously configured on either the ESXi cluster or the UCS, so I created the port groups on ESXi (I'm quite familiar with this process as I've done it many times)  and added them to the vSwitch, then on UCS (with which I'm not as familiarized as I am with ESXi) I update the NIC templates adding the new vlans. However that didn't do it, the VM was unable to communicate with the SVIs configured on the N5Ks, so what I did next was to add the vlans directly on each vNIC on each server, still nothing no connectivity for the new vlans. I want to clarify these vlans already exist on the N5Ks (actually they're quite old by now) and trunk ports on their end are allowing all vlans. Is there anything I could be missing at the UCS? Cause that the part I'm less famliarized with.

Thanks and regards

[Steven Tardy]

On the UCS side there is two steps detailed here:

  https://community.cisco.com/t5/data-center-documents/configuring-vlans-on-ucs-and-vmware/ta-p/3143374

1. Add VLAN to UCS Manager globally.
2. Add VLAN to vNIC.

Sounds like you've already done both of those.

Did you select (native VLAN) on either the vNIC or on UCS globally?

Did you create the VLAN on Fabric A (or Fabric B) instead of globally by accident?

Is the VLAN a native VLAN upstream?

Check both UCS FIs to see if the VM MAC address is learned.

SSH to UCSM IP and run (where VLAN 311 would be your VLAN ID):

HX-01-UCS-B# connect nxos a
HX-01-UCS-A(nxos)# show mac address vlan 311
HX-01-UCS-A(nxos)# exit
HX-01-UCS-B# connect nxos b
HX-01-UCS-B(nxos)# show mac address vlan 311
HX-01-UCS-B(nxos)# exit
HX-01-UCS-B#

Open the VM console and ping FROM the VM just to make sure the mac address table would be populated and not aged out.

I'd also try to grep for the last four of the MAC address to see if the MAC shows up in another VLAN by accident:

HX-01-UCS-A(nxos)# show mac address | grep 6600
* 311      0050.568b.6600    dynamic   0          F    F  Veth1171

Is the vSwitch port-group configured to specify the VLAN (also detailed in the above linked doc)?

[SacoPablo]

Hello, 

Thanks! So I just checked the vlan db on both fabrics (via CLI) and all the new vlans are trunked there) however when pinging from the VM in question mac address table for these particular vlans are not getting populated. Quite strange, also yes port groups are specifying the vlans