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VIC 1340 PCI placement issues

ssumichrast
Level 1
Level 1

This is not so much a post looking for assistance (maybe it will turn in to that, I'm not sure).  Rather I thought I'd share what I think is happening now with the VIC 1340 cards so others can avoid some headaches.

 

It looks like Cisco made some changes with the VIC 1340 card installed in B200 M4 blades.  These cards now have two PCI paths which result in effectively appearing to have two adapters, without actually appearing to have two adapters (you won't see a second adapter listed in server inventory, but you do now have two distinct PCI ID trees).  Cisco bug ID CSCut78943 has more information on this.  It appears that now if you have a VIC 1340 card you now have the ability to specify a host-port (controlled in PCI placement screen) to tell UCS what port of the 1340 the virtual adapter should be using.

Perhaps someone else could validate my thinking here (I've opened a case with TAC for validation as well), but that seems to be what's happening.

 

More details on my specific situation:

This is causing a massive headache for me now with updating templates running ESXi.  We just recently added a second pair of NICs to support a new disjoint layer 2 uplink.  When we did that the PCI order for the B200 M3's with the VIC 1240 cards added two more PCI devices to the end of my order -- PCI ID 11 and 12  This bumped my vHBAs from 11 and 12 to 13 and 14.  This had no effect on my B200 M3s -- ESXi could care less.  It saw two new NICs, it still saw the same PCI HBAs even though they had new IDs -- no problem.  On the B200 M4s with VIC 1340, however, chaos ensued.  Currently my VIC1340s place the PCI devices as 1-5 as vNICs-A, 6 as vHBA-A, 7-11 as vNICs-B and 12 as vHBA-B.  When we added two additional vNICs to support the new disjoint layer 2 connection, though, it added them in the middle.  I now had ID 1-6 for vNICs, 7 for vHBA-A, 8-12 as vNICs and 13 as vHBA-B.  This caused massive chaos within ESXi -- adapters that were configured to specific port groups were now not associated with the right port groups.  VMs that vMotioned to the B200 M4's lost connectivity and all sorts of bad stuff...

What seems to make things better right now is to specify in the PCI Placement screen that all virtual interfaces are only using admin host-port 1.  This makes the B200 M4s act exactly like the B200 M3s.  Ideally I'd like to use both ports, but I'm not sure how I can do that and keep ESXi happy right now.

Any validation I can get plus from TAC would be helpful before we schedule a window to change this.

I really wanted to get this information out there as up til now all the blogs and posts I'm reading here speak about how the half-width blades only have one VCON/PCI tree/adapter port.  It appears Cisco has muddied the waters a bit by now allowing the 1340 to have multiple ports, and thus muck with the PCI order more.

 

 

18 Replies 18

gman66
Level 1
Level 1

@ REkdal163 - thanks for this, however, the web client doesn't have an area that shows PCI assignments, you may have been looking at the old thick client that used flash.  This is where I'm stumped because the output of the command "localcli --plugin-dir /usr/lib/vmware/esxcli/int/ deviceInternal alias list"  is difficult to interpret, it doesn't show you PCI 1 - what ever, it looks like this:

pci p0000:67:00.3 vmhba1
pci p0000:67:00.2 vmnic2
pci s00000001:03.02 vmnic1
pci p0000:67:00.4 vmhba2
pci p0000:67:00.0 vmnic4
pci s00000001:03.00 vmnic0
pci p0000:67:00.1 vmnic5
pci s00000001:03.01 vmnic3
pci s00000004.00 vmhba3
pci p0000:00:11.5 vmhba0

Some entries start with P, some with S, and the numbering..  I do see some resemblance of ordering but need some clarification.   

 

 

gman66
Level 1
Level 1

I have stability when configuring the admin host port to 1 for the vNICs and 2 for the vHBAs, but my concern is how this affects traffic.  I recognize that setting the admin host port to 1 vs 2 will affect enumeration, but does it affect IO at all?  do these settings have an impact on IO and bandwidth?  

Apologies for late reply, was OOO for a few days..

Looks as though you have the PCI/vmnic association sorted. I just had to do some stare and compare work to make the associations between what the CLI and vcenter shows.

Screen shot attached to show what I used...

As for IO, I have no doc indicating how B/W is allocated across the virtual ports within the VIC.

gman66
Level 1
Level 1

@ Rekdal - thanks for helping.  

Anyone else want to help with explaining what impact the admin host port setting, manually defining the PCI channel within the 1340 VIC, will have on throughput?  if any at all?    

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