ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue
October 26th, 2010 | 
Author: A collegue of mine, John Grinwis, pointed out a bug within a combination of ESXi, host profiles and an EMC CLARiiON: At some point the ESXi nodes swap their VMkernel ports and the CLARiiON then proceeds to register the wrong network as the management network
UPDATE: There now is a workaround available. Please visit Workaround: ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue
There appears to be a bug somewhere in vSphere 4.1 host profiles (I’ve been told by Duco Jaspars vSphere 4.0 is ok): The hosts in this situation have two VMkernel ports: management and VMotion. A pretty ordinary setup I’d say. But at some point the host profiles managed to mix up the VMKernel port numbers:
correct one:
C:Program FilesVMwareVMware vSphere CLIbin>vicfg-vmknic.pl --server x.y.z.45 -list
| Interface | Port Group/DVPort | IP Family | IP Address |
| vmk0 | Management Network | IPv4 | x.y.z.45 |
| vmk1 | VMotion | IPv4 | m.n.p.24 |
incorrect one:
C:Program FilesVMwareVMware vSphere CLIbin>vicfg-vmknic.pl --server x.y.z.44 -list
| Interface | Port Group/DVPort | IP Family | IP Address |
| vmk0 | VMotion | IPv4 | m.n.p.23 |
| vmk1 | Management Network | IPv4 | x.y.z.44 |
You can clearly see, that the incorrect node has its Management and VMotion VMKx numbers reversed. This causes a connected CLARiiON to negotiate the wrong management IP address:
This raises another issue though. Because one can discuss about where this error comes from exactly.
- You could blame the host profiles, but then again, why should VMK0 always be the management interface?
- You could blame the CLARiiON, because it just uses VMK0 instead of the real management interface. But then again, what to do if you configure two VMkernels for management?
- You could blame the VMware-CLARiiON interfacing logic. I guess that would be the right one, somewhere you simply NEED to configure which VMkernel interface should be used by the Clariion…
I hope VMware/EMC fixes this issue soon; host profiles are simply toooo easy 🙂
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[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by VM Spotlight, Erik Zandboer. Erik Zandboer said: New Blogpost! EMC Clariion uses the wrong VMK interface when registering ESXi nodes (host profile issue?) http://lnkd.in/JPGMP7 […]
“I hope VMware/EMC fixes this issue soon; host profiles are simply toooo easy”
Well they won’t be fixing it soon. In fact, we all have to wait until the next major release next year. We’ve experienced the same issue and I raised an SR with VMware. They view the code change in the vmkernel too great to issue a patch, and even a KB for that matter.
See my thread, we share the pain…
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/290198?tstart=0
-gogogo5
[…] one. And we’re not alone in feeling some pain about this, as Erik Zandboer noted on his blog. So I guess at this stage we’ll seriously reconsider if and how we use host profiles in the […]
Erik,
had a look friday at the same nodes you mention above. Switching the vmk0 with vmk1 is also screwing up the console interface. F2 is now showing the vmotion ip address in the network config, so that one is also looking at vmk0.
Had to configure the vswitches and portgroups for some new nodes by hand and applied the profile to set some other stuff.
John
Ey John,
Please look at the update I posted on the issue. Thanks to the VMTN and Duco 🙂
Check it out on http://www.vmdamentals.com/?p=1485
[…] issue mentioned in one of my previous blogposts (see ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue) now has a workaround! The problem is that the host profiles of vSphere mix up the vmk0 and vmk1 […]