We're using ESXi as the hypervisor and VM-FEX as the virtual switch in our UCS environment. Recently I wanted to capture all traffic to/from a virtual machine and learned that I'm a bit limited on what I can do. The Traffic Monitoring feature on UCSM lets me specify a variety of SPAN sources, but only lets me specify a physical port on the fabric interconnect for the destination. I basically want to set a SPAN/Traffic Monitor destination as either another virtual machine or create an ERSPAN to a remote host. I don't want to connect a physical machine to the FI just to capture traffic.
Over the years we've seen SPAN evolve from local SPAN, to RSPAN, to ERSPAN, to enhanced features on all where you can filter the source, the VLAN, direction, etc. The fact that UCSM (or VM-FEX) only supports a physical port for the destination is a bit disappointing considering how mature SPAN and the UCS are now. I spent several days googling trying to find a workaround, but everything tells me to go with the Nexus 1000v if I want more support for SPAN/ERSPAN.
Am I missing something?
Will more sophisticated SPAN support come in later releases? (I already checked release notes up to 3.5 and didn't see anything)
FYI: I'm the network engineer in my environment, but the UCS environment is managed by the server team, so pardon my unfamiliarity with the technology if I'm missing something.
Thanks!
