UCS B200 M4 with Esxi

[noorul]

Hello Everyone,

We have a UCS B200 M4 blade server installed with ESXi 6.0. This host is working fine with the vcenter with standard switch. We want to migrate the mgmt network to distributed switch from standard switch. But when we try to do that, esxi host disconnects from vcenter and rollback to the standard switch. We tried this with other HPE blades in the same cluster and those were not having any issue. Anything i am missing here ? Please help. 

UCS blade has 3 physical NICs and assigned each NIC to standard switch and distributed switch.

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

The b200M4, as does a number of other blades, has the capability of housing multiple VIC cards.

Depending on your vnic placement policy, your vnic ordering/numbering may not match what you think your vmware VMNIC number actually is.

I would suggesting checking your ESXi VMNIC list with their MAC address, and then compare it with your service profile vnic list.  It may be that your if your numbering is off, then the allowed vlan/vlan configuration needs to be adjusted.

Also, if you added additional vnics to accommodate your move to a dVS then this becomes even more likely as ESXi does not handle adding additional vnics/vHBAs very well without some re configuring.

If your vlans/vnics/VMNICs all seem to line up, then make sure you don't have a jumboframe issue. 

I would add a temporary VMK port, have it managed by the dVS you have created, and do some vmkping tests utilizing the vmkport # you have created.  Test with jumbo frame sizes (if jumboframes are your design) and vmkping your vcenter, and other esxi hosts.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[noorul]

Hi Kirk, Many thanks for the response.

I cross checked the VNICs in profile and esxi and all are lined up. We have not defined any vnic placement policy, just created with default setting during service profile creation. Will this have any impact ?

I have tested this with 2 NICs in the blade and each one for standard switch and dvs. Still the result was same.

I am not sure on your suggestion on jumbo frames. In our environment we dont use jumbo frames.

I tried to add a VMK port to dvs and set it to DHCP, and it takes the IP. Tested the vmkping using that port and i am able to ping vcenter and other hosts. 

One thing i noticed is, when we define VLAN in the port group settings, cant ping any hosts. If we set VLAN to "None" ping is ok and VMs in the dvs also get connected. Not sure this will have any relation. But still, after set to "none" i tried to migrate mgmt from std to dvs, still it fails.

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

If I understand you correctly, your current standard vswitch port groups won't let you use vlan tagging...

Can you confirm that the various vnics in your service profiles don't have your esxi mgmt vlan marked as native?  For ESXi in general, you should not be using native vlans unless you have something pxe or iscsi booting.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[noorul]

Hello Kirk,

Perfect !. Once i remove the Native VLAN option from my MGMT VLAN , all went good. i was able to migrate to DV switch without any issue too. Thank you !

By the way just wondering why that native VLAN option does something like that?

[Kirk J]

The native vlan option is meant to take 'untagged' traffic, and then add the tag for you.

When you get tagged traffic already for that vlan that is also marked native, it's "kind of" like trying to send tagged trunk traffic to an access port, that's not expecting vlan tag (might not be perfect explanation, but should get the concept across )

Thanks,

Kirk...

[noorul]

Thanks Kirk for the info.