Network Troubleshooting & Configuration in vsphere 5.0 2010 VMware Inc. All rights reserved
Agenda Physical Network Introduction to Virtual Network Teaming - Redundancy and Load Balancing VLAN Implementation Introduction to Distributed Virtual Switch Best Practices 2
Physical vs Virtual Physical Virtual Physical Switch Physical Switch Conventional access, distribution, core design Design with redundancy for enhanced availability Under the covers, virtual network same as physical Access layer implemented as virtual switches Virtual Switch 3
ESX Networking Capabilities Layer 2 functionality no L3 routing VLAN Segmentation partition traffic without physical network & NIC restrictions Rate limiting restrict traffic generated by a VM Server NIC port aggregation (VMware NIC Teaming): Load balancing for better use of physical network Redundancy for enhanced availability 4
ESX Network Traffic - Classification Virtual Machine Traffic Traffic sourced and received from virtual machine(s) Isolated from each other VMotion Traffic Traffic sent when moving a virtual machine from one ESX host to another Must be dedicated and isolated Management Traffic Should be isolated from VM traffic If VMware HA is enabled, includes heartbeats IP Storage Traffic NFS, iscsi If using the software iscsi initiator 5
6 NIC Teaming
Load balancing & Redundancy NIC Teaming Access A1 Core A2 and multiple connections for switch redundancy 7 DO NOT DISTRIBUTE TO ANY PERSONS OUTSIDE OF VMWARE, INC.
Load Balancing - Originating Virtual Port ID Based Default mode, distributes load on a per vnic basis Physical switches not aware/involved Virtual NICs VM ports uplink ports Teamed physical NICs 8
Load Balancing - MAC Based Teaming Distributes load on a source MAC hash basis Physical switches not aware/involved Virtual NICs VM ports uplink ports Teamed physical NICs 9
Load Balancing - IP Hash Based Distributes load on a per SRC IP/DST IP basis (hash) Requires Portchannel/Etherchannel on physical switches Virtual NICs SRC IP A SRC IP B SRC IP C VM ports uplink ports Teamed physical NICs DST IP D DST IP E DST IP F PM0 PM1 PM2 10
Redundancy-Failure Detection ESX Host Link Status or Beaconing available on ESX Speeding up failure detection Access Core Virtual Switch Link State Tracking associates upstream and downstream links Recommendation: Ensure robust L2 network design For faster failover detection, enable Link status detection on vswitch Link State Tracking on physical switches 11
12 VLAN Implementation
VLAN Tagging Options VST Virtual Switch Tagging VGT Virtual Guest Tagging EST External Switch Tagging Port Groups assigned to a VLAN vnic vswitch vnic vnic vnic vswitch vnic vnic vnic vswitch vnic vnic VLAN Tags applied in vswitch VLAN Tags applied in Guest PortGroup set to VLAN 4095 Physical Switch Physical Switch Physical Switch External Physical switch applies VLAN tags 13
14 vnetwork Distributed Switch
Distributed Virtual Network (vnetwork) Standard vswitch vcenter vnetwork & dvswitch vcenter 15
vdistributed Switch Architecture Control Plane (CP) and Data Plane, or IP Plane are separated CP, responsible for configuring dvswitches,dvportgroups, dvports, Uplinks, NICTeaming and so on, and for coordinating the migration of the ports, runs on vcenter DP, resposible for performing the forwarding, runs inside the VMKernel of the ESX (vswitch) Distributed vswitch vcenter Control Plane ESX 4 ESX 4 ESX 4 Distributed vswitch vswitch vswitch vswitch vswitch I/O Plane 16
vswitch vs DVSwitch Capabilities vswitch dvswitch L2 Switch Yes Yes VLAN Segmentation Yes Yes 802.1Q Tagging Yes Yes NIC Teaming Yes Yes TX Rate Limiting Yes Yes RX Rate Limiting No Yes Unified Management Interface No Yes PVLAN No Yes 3rd Party Virtual Switch Support No Yes 17
18 Troubleshooting & Best Practices
Best Practices: Network-Bandwidth Usage 19
Best Practices: Configuration Enable on Physical Switch Ports Spanning Tree Protocol- Loop avoidance mechanism PortFast- Fast convergence after failure Link State tracking-detection of upstream ports(on Cisco switches) Validate Duplex settings NIC Hardware status Link status Switch Port status Switch Port Configuration Ensure adequate CPU resources are available Heavy gigabit networking loads are CPU-intensive Both native and virtualized 20
Additional Resources-Documentation Network-Configuration & Administration http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.icbase/pdf/vsphere-esxivcenter-server-50-networking-guide.pdf Performance Best Practices http://www.vmware.com/pdf/perf_best_practices_vsphere5.0.pdf KB articles ESX/ESXi hosts have intermittent or no network connectivity (1004109) Configuring networking from the ESX service console command line (1000258) Verifying ESX host networking configuration on the service console (1003796) Observed IP range does not show network in ESX or ESXi (1006744) Configuring the ESXi Management Network from the direct console (1006710) 21