ChadAEG wrote:
My post was more to state that we aren't seeing the issues you are, so it may be a combination of variables in your particular environment than a general bug in ESXi's networking, but you probably already gathered that from the blog post.
I'm not sure why you would assume that because your experiencing an issue in your environment everyone else is as well. We don't have multicast packet loss, or any other type of packet loss, beyond what you would normally see for link congestion or other normal packet drop situations, unless we are dealing with faulty hardware or cabling. Andy yes, our NOC and network engineers know how to use packet sniffers. We are a financial institution, and we run many of those applications your referring to, and are pretty sensitive to our applications not working as expected.
There are no congestion in our environment. The ESX host has a 10Gig NIC with about 50Mbps utilization (5% utilization) so there are no congestion.
Furthermore, if the sniffer says that the multicast traffics did get to the ESX host, I do believe it because I put the sniffer in in-line mode with the ESX
host. Even VMware TAC confirmed it and they don't know why it behaves this way.
ChadAEG wrote:
Without knowing what steps support has already had you try, it's hard to suggest what else to do. Moving the vm to another hardware combination is a quick way to rule out firmware and nic driver issues, etc.
VMWare is already looking at this issue for over six months. They have verified that the box firmware and BIOS are up-to-date and certified hardware.
By the way, we only 1 virtual machine on that ESX host and we still multicast packet loss. Moving the VM to another ESX hosts make no difference.
VMware TAC had suggested many things over the past six months without any lucks.
ChadAEG wrote:
you could replace VMware's generic DVS with the Nexus 1000v and see if it exhibits the same behavior. This would also give you more visibility to track the packet activity inside the virtual switch.
What make you think that replacing with the Nexus 1000v will fix the issue? I was in the process of doing just that until I realize that by doing that, I am now will have to deal with two different vendors, Cisco and VMWare for issues like this, and you know what is going to happen right? Vendors finger pointing at each other and the customer (me) get screwed.
Cisco is a networking company, mainly hardware. In the virtualization world, cisco does not have an advantage over VMWare vswitch or other vendors, IMHO.