The Problem

This week I had to connect an additional NetApp Storage System to my existing UCS environment through a different path than a similar shared storage platform that we utilize here. This shouldn’t be a big deal but there were a few caveats:

• The Storage System was attached to a dedicated Nexus 5k for this customer
• The VLAN configured on the customer switch collided with one configured in UCS so VLAN translation was necessary through access ports.
• The traffic takes a different switching path from normal NFS traffic in this environment

I configured everything as one normally does when connecting to IP storage, jumbo frames and all. There was only one problem:

~ # vmkping -s 1400 -d 10.0.0.253
PING 10.0.0.253 (10.0.0.253): 1400 data bytes
2508 bytes from 10.0.0.253: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=0.232 ms
2508 bytes from 10.0.0.253: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.198 ms
2508 bytes from 10.0.0.253: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=0.265 ms

--- 10.0.0.253 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.198/0.232/0.265 ms
~ #

~ # vmkping -s 2500 -d 10.0.0.253
PING 10.0.0.253 (10.0.0.253): 2500 data bytes

--- 10.0.0.253 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
~ #

DOH!

Now, normally this is just a simple issue of the MTU being set incorrectly somewhere along the traffic path but as I dug deeper into this issue that turned out to not be the case, it was something much stranger and more interesting. The IPs, VLANs and hostnames have been changed or obscured to protect the innocent. Onward!

Today I had an entire datastore of VMs to register, probably about 30 in total, and I didn’t want to go through the GUI and register each VM manually.

I came up with this quick unix one-liner:

# NOTE: My datastore path is /vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73
# replace this with whatever datastore needs searching

#VMs
find /vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73 -name "*.vmx" -exec  vim-cmd solo/registervm {} \;

#Templates
find /vmfs/volumes/5317a80e-add165f6-ada9-001517599f73 -name "*.vtmx" -exec  vim-cmd solo/registervm {} \;

Just wanted to post a quick post about how to configure 802.3ad port consolidation with a Cisco switch and VMware ESX (vSphere was used for this example). I was using an HP DL380 with 2 onboard NIC and 2 24 port Cisco 3750G connected with stackwise cables.

Switch Configuration:

…
interface GigabitEthernet1/0/1
description ESX NIC 2
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode on
end
…
interface GigabitEthernet2/0/14
description ESX NIC 2
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode on
end
…
interface Port-channel1
description ESX PortChannel
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk
end
…