ESX 4.0 FT issue

M

mike938

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 22, 2007
Messages
97
Hey all, I got ESX up and running in a home lab environment and went to try out fault tolerance on a PFsense VM and ran into an error. (And i get the same thing on whichever VM I try to use FT on)

It enables just fine but when I start the VM it fails to power on the secondary VM. Under the Tasks & Events tab, tasks subtab it just says:
Code: 
Name:   Start Fault Tolerance Secondary VM
Target: PFSense
Status: Cannot power On the Fault Tolerance Secondary VM for virtual machine 
        PFSense. Refer to the errors list for details.
And error list just says that my first host is invalid as a target to launch the 2ndary VM on because it is the same as the primary and the second host times out. However, when I go to the Events subtab, there are raised events citing a MAC address conflict.
Code: 
Fault Tolerance state on PFSense changed from 
Starting to Enabled
info

The MAC address (00:50:56:90:0f:05) of PFSense 
conflicts with MAC assigned to  PFSense
error

vCenter disabled Fault Tolerance on VM 
'PFSense' because the Secondary VM could not 
be powered On.
error

If anyone knows how to solve this problem or has any advice as to how to go about trying to solve this I'd greatly appreciate it.
 
General setup is 2 hosts running on dual Xeon e5405 with 16GB of ram each. 2 Quad port NICs in each, only 4 ports being used.
Storage setup is via 2Gb FC to a FC target running on linux.

Network setup below:



Event log after trying to enable fault tolerance (bottom entry is oldest):




If more information is needed let me know and I'll go and get it.
 
It was using E1000 based NICs. I tried using vmxnet2 (3 wasn't an option) and received the same errors.
 
No, they all get the same MAC address issue. I tried it on 2 other VMs running on either host.
 
Right now I just have each vmotion nic port plugged in to 2 ports set for a port-based vlan, same with FT but a different vlan, then the service console is just on the standard vlan. The WAN virtual network is running on the same port as the normal vlan set for port-based for the standard vlan and tagged for the WAN vlan

Edit: Sure I'll go get that now
 
How should I post the files?
The vmx isn't too long but the log is 78KB or so.
 
create a blank vm and try to fire it up in FT mode. No OS. Make it Win2k3 with the flexnet ethernet card. Then try it with the e1000 ethernet card.
 
With a fresh 2003 standard x86 VM (nothing installed, but set that way) with flexible NIC it gave me the same error.
Same when I change the NIC to be a E1000
 
ok, so it's not the FreeBSD part and it's not the NICs. Let me bounce something off someone at work tomorrow.
 
no worries - wish i wasnt' as slammed and could put more time @ this :(
 
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