Management Interface And Standby Adapters (ESXi 5)

A

Adam12176

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 27, 2007
Messages
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Back again! I think/hope this one is less hardware related, and more about a logical piece I'm missing.

I have two interfaces I'm trying to assign as active/standby and standby/active for Management and vMotion respectively. For a better graphic than I can provide, see Duncan Epping's article here. I stumbled across that while trying to verify what I was trying to do wasn't insane. That graphic is exactly what I was trying to do.

So - the issue is that when the second interface is added to the vSwitch and added as a standby adapter for the port group, the hosts loses connectivity to vCenter. Doesn't ping. Both interfaces are listed as active in DCUI. Honestly, I didn't think to look at this before and after. I don't know if a standby adapter in DCUI should be listed as 'used'. Verified physical wiring too, that port is absolutely cabled where I would expect it to be.

The article above does reference setting failback to 'no' to avoid a false positive at boot. I haven't tried this yet. Any ideas? Do other people have this set up a different way that I haven't considered?
 
Do you have the two adapters set in a port-channel on the physical switch? If so, don't.
 
No, those two NICs aren't teamed or anything.

I just tried this again to make sure I didn't miss something. After setting the second NIC to standby, ESX won't reboot. It sits there indefinitely saying that a reboot is in progress, but won't actually do it.

Updating some other crap (DRAC, Lifecycle) now - we'll see what the score is in a few minutes when it comes back up.
 
Adam12176 said:
Dell R810

One Broadcom 5709 interface, and one Intel ET2.
Click to expand...

wouldn't that be TWO 5709's ? and one of them is the iDrac6 port.. ?


And im sure the R810 has 4 ethernet ports ?

r810-back.jpg
 
Yes, Dash.

There are 4 integrated Broadcom interfaces, and I have one Intel ET2 quad nic in the machine too. The idea is to use one interface from each NIC to protect against failure of the card/integrated interfaces.

The problem is that when you set the Intel NIC to standby (or active, tried that too now) under network config. When I reboot the machine it won't connect to anything. If you remove the second NIC in DCUI everything goes back to normal. Even better, I can add the second NIC back in as a secondary and ESX isn't reporting that host as down. It's only on reboot, and removing/readding the adapter fixes it. This is really strange.

NetJunkie, would disabling failback be worth a shot on another reboot? I'm just wondering if that is relevant given Duncan's stance on it.
 
Yeah, understood. This is just getting really weird.

Did one more impromptu test before I left: Unplugged the Broadcom interface and sure enough, the Intel one took over. Host still pings, reported as up in vCenter. So as far as I can tell the actual interfaces are working correctly, just the ESX part of this equation isn't doing something right on startup.

I might try it with two Broadcom interfaces tomorrow, see if I get the same behavior.
 
Works with two Broadcom interfaces. No intervention required on reboot. Isn't that a beeyotch.
 
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