Looking for help with the following issue:
Issue: When I team two or more physical nics on my ESXi 5.5 U1 host on the vswitch containing the management vmk and ping the host management vmk IP address from other devices it will drop packets.
Here is some information that I believe may be helpful to others in diagnosing my issue:
- The packet drop rate seems to be between 5-10% when pinging the mgmt vmk from another device on the network.
- When I ping from the ESXi host out to other network devices I get NO packet loss in my outbound pings.
- As soon as I remove the teamed NIC from the vSwitch and go back to using just one physical NIC the problem disappears.
- I am using "Route based on the originating virtual port ID" for my load balancing algorithm on the vSwitch and vmk port itself. No specific configuration settings have been done at the switch level in relationship to this.
- All the host's physical NICs are connected to a stack of 6 Dell PowerConnect M8024k switches. All 6 physical switches are cabled together and configured as one logical switch stack. M8024k switches are all I/O modules in the back of blade chassis.
- All physical NICs are dual-port Broadcom 57810 CNAs. There are total of 6 ports for each host spread across 3 CNAs.
- Al physical NICs are running NPAR to split each physical NIC port out into 4 virtual NICs. This results in a total of 24 vmnics for the host. (6 ports * 4 NPAR functions per port = 24)
- All NIC ports have a native untagged VLAN that the mgmt vmk uses and also carry additional tagged VLANs. Connecting ports on the M8024k switches run in General (hybrid) mode with the mgmt vmk vlan as the untagged vlan.
- Server hardware is Dell PowerEdge M620 Blade server.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Have seen this issue on multiple hosts running off this particular blade chassis. On other hosts the problem seemed to magically disappear at some point but I cant seem to pin down what configuration change I made on them that resolved the issue for the other hosts.
Thanks,
Mike