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In: Linux, rsyslog
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I have a customer who doesn’t have a syslog server configured in his vSphere environment.  I first recommended we install vRealize Log Insight, it’s a great product and has ton of insightful information when used with vCenter, vSphere and NSX.  But the customer didn’t want to worry about licensing, so we decided to stand up a CentOS rsyslog server to show the power of having a centralized syslog.  This is especially true for NSX installations, I mean using syslog in the DFW alone will save a ton of troubleshooting time. This article assumes you know how to use vi or something similar in the LinuxRead More →

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In: Cisco, LACP, LACP, Networking, VMware, vSphere
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So you have decided to go with Enhanced LACP.  Great choice, if you don’t plan to use auto-deploy and host profiles to do it.  This my friend is a manual process, well at least for those that don’t do Python scripting.  The focus of this article is to document how I got vSphere 6 and Cisco IOS to behave with vSphere 6 Enhanced LACP. The first step is to prepare the environment for LACP.  If this configuration is taking place where host management, vCenter, and workloads that you want to actually not get disconnected it is recommended to configure this on a separate set ofRead More →

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In: Logical Switch, NSX, VMware
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When using IP discovery on logical switches in VMware NSX for vSphere 6.2.0, you experience these symptoms: The ESXi 5.x and 6.x host fails with a purple diagnostic screen The purple diagnostic screen contains entries similar to: @BlueScreen: CPU xx /World xxxxx tried to re-acquire lock dvfg.sec.confg PTEs:0xnnnnnnnn;0xnnnnnnnn;0x0; 0xnnnnnnnn:[0xnnnnnnnn]PanicvPanicInt@vmkernel#nover+0x37e 0xnnnnnnnn:[0xnnnnnnnn]Panic_NoSave@vmkernel#nover+0x4d In order to protect from this issue you must disable IP discovery for all logical switches.  This prevents the issue from occurring. NOTE:  Disabling IP discovery disables broadcast suppression for ARP traffic.  Which may, or may not cause a performance hit depending on the environment.  Additionally if you used new features in NSX 6.2 to allowRead More →

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In: VCA, VMware
With: 9 Comments

In my case I had a network outage in my lab which resulted in the VCA, NSX Manager, Platform Services Controller, nearly everything to crash or hang.  Upon restart of the VCA and PSC I received the some errors associated with /dev/mapper/log_vg-log partition.  Asking me to fix the error manually. The problem was if I follow the instructions to enable the shell so I can run fsck, I simply get an unknown command error. Here is what I had to do to get moving again. Hit Control-D or Reboot the vCSA using the vSphere Client. When the GRUB bootloader appears, press the spacebar to disable autoboot.Read More →

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In: Cluster Design, NSX, VMware
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While waiting for another session to start at TechSummit some colleagues @markmeulemans Bill Mansfield and I had the discussion around when is a dedicated Edge Cluster actually necessary.  This is the outcome of that discussion. Like many other VMware products, NSX for vSphere can actually be deployed in a relativity small footprint.  This is especially true for Proof of Concept / training / nested lab environments.  The decision to do things like a dedicated Management, Edge, and Payload cluster are typically “for us” associated with customer imposed constraints.  These constraints are often physical data center layout, compute limitations, or legacy design. Dedicated Edge Cluster HavingRead More →

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In: NSX, VMware
With: 1 Comment

There are considerations on where to place the “Active” DLR Control-VM.  This is due to an issue where “if” the active DLR Control-VM and any Active Edge are on the same host during a host failure the DLR Control-VM will not be able to provide the controller-cluster with routing updates. This will cause a black-hole effect because the routes associated with the failed Edge router have not been removed. By separating them, if the host with the active DLR Control-VM goes down there is no need to update routes as all Edge devices are still up and available.  The same goes if a host withRead More →

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In: Networking, VMware, vSphere
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I have a customer who recently told me they are ripping out the LACP configuration on their vSphere hosts.  I asked them why and they simply stated… “It’s difficult to configure and deploy, additionally we want to start leveraging vSphere Auto-Deploy and host profiles for deploying new hosts!“ This prompted me to set off on the journey of configuring LACP in my lab and see what’s to this “hard to configure stuff”.  Well it turns out that it can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you cannot have any downtime during the migration.  I attempted several methods and failed a ton of timesRead More →

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In: L2VPN Standalone, NSX
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Recently I deployed an NSX L2VPN to address some needs at a customer prior to a data center migration when we hit the wall… its not passing traffic. I knew we had the L2VPN configured properly because we see the L2VPN statistics show the Tunnel Status as up. Well it turns out this is fairly common as most people (me included) forget to add the SYNC port in the source (client VPN) vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS).  To resolve this you need to do one of the following… Enable a Sync port on the DVPort ID associated with the edge trunk vNIC (most often eth1).  ToRead More →

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In: Logical Switch, NSX
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Today I had a customer ask me so what happens if I select Enable MAC Learning when I create a new logical switch.  Well the answer is simple and most likely something you will never need to use.  Enabling MAC learning is useful if the virtual workloads have multiple MAC addresses or are using vmnics with trunking. Enabling MAC Learning builds a VLAN/MAC pair learning table on each vNic.  This table is stored as part of the dvfilter data.  During vMotion, dvfilter saves and restores the table at the new location.  The switch then issues RARPs for all the VLAN/MAC entries in the table.  Read More →

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In: General
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My recent experience installing and configuring an NSX Stand-Alone L2VPN at a customer site has inspired me to start blogging.  My intent is to post items where I have challenges, items past and present customers ask about, updates to NSX, and my challenges eating healthy while traveling weekly. Sit back and enjoy the ride!Read More →