Hello,
i am experiencing issue while using two standard vSwitches for guest OS bonding.
vSphere/ESX is 5.0
I am using a HP blade chassis with two IO modules, each has one uplink to external switch.
ESX on a blade inside the chassis is configured with one vSwitch per uplink and multiple port-groups.
Both side (uplink trunks A and B) are identical in terms of allowed VLANs ... and therefore also vSwitches are identical.
vSwitch1:
NA uplink: vmnic1
Pgroup1: untagged (native)
Pgroup2: VLAN 1 (tagged)
Pgroup3: VLAN 2 (tagged)
vSwitch2:
NA uplink: vmnic2
Pgroup1: untagged (native)
Pgroup2: VLAN 1 (tagged)
Pgroup3: VLAN 2 (tagged)
Each VM on the ESX host has one interface per port-group on each vSwitch assigned.
The Linux guest OS uses interfaces in same Pgroup from vSwitch1 and vSwitch2 as bond interface.
Issue is now:
VMs can ping each other (and also the network gateway) inside their port-groups if all active slaves of the bond interfaces are on same vSwicth (therefore VMs should be switched inside vSwitch).
If one of the VMs has active slave of bond on other vSwitch, it still can ping external infrastructure network gateways but not the other VMs anymore.
Normally the same port-groups VLANs should be switched via the external switch were both uplinks of vSwitches are connected (i also see that if active slave of bond changes, the uplink port assignment for VM bond MAC address changes in MAC table of external switch) but it cannot ping other VMs in same port-group (VLAN) which reside on (mirror) other vSwitch.
I checked external network ... and everything seems fine- i checked ESX networking which also seems fine on both vSwitches- really strange thing is that i can always (does not matter if active slave of bond is on vSwitch1 or vSwitch2 the network gateway addresses which reside on external switches/router but not between VMs if active slave bond interfaces of guest OS reside on different (but identical) vSwitches.
Anyone came across this or has any clue what could causing this?!