ZFSRocks wrote:
I am not at all familier with Default Port ID. Can you point me to some info on it?
The VMware Port ID gives you a simple kind of load balancing together with failover. However, a single VM could not get more bandwidth than a single physical NIC port can give. The only "extra" for IP Hash is that it could give a VM the bandwidth of several physical NICs port at the same time, if there are multiple external clients.
Here are a good overview: http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/the-great-vswitch-debate%E2%80%93part-3/
ZFSRocks wrote:
I seem to have full control of it from vCenter but I cannot vmkping it from the other hosts. vCenter has it in alarm state and says "HA detected a possible host failure of this host." I cannot get it to clear. So, what is up? It seems to be in an operational state yet it isn't?
The possible host failure detection from HA comes from the loss of management connectivity, so the network is not stable in this condition.
I see two possible reasons at the moment:
1. The configuration from the DCUI might do something "strange" with the vSwitch IP Hash configuration. For IP Hash you must have that NIC teaming policy set on both the vSwitch and on all port groups, including the vmkernel. If the vmkernel (management) has for some reason a different NIC Teaming Policy that it will not work.
2. Another possibility is that either is multi-switch etherchannel (LAG) not working on your switch type, or it has in some way not been correctly configured.
The sympthoms you get indicates a non-working Link Aggregation, in the meaning that the both sides do not agree over which ports are part of the team, and one of the parts sends packets over a link that the other parts belives is a non-member and the frames are throwed away.
Do you have any log on the physical switches? Do you see any MAC flapping errors or other?