View / ESXi with Cisco EtherChannel

[dturner71]

Hi All,

I'm having issues very similar to that discussed here, but with virtual desktop connections randomly dropping and becoming unavailable.

I am using etherchannel and found that the load balancing policy on the Cisco end was set to src-mac, so I changed it to src-dst-ip per vmware docs and the cited discussion thread, but I'm still seeing the drops. I didn't restart anything after making the change and am wondering if i need to for it to take effect? Maybe the ESX hosts need to be bounced?

Any other ideas on what might cause the above symptom?

I'm using ESXi 4 U1 and View Manager 4.0.1.

[dturner71]

UPDATE: it's definitely a load balancing issue. Took the EtherChannel down to 1 port (unplugged the extras) and configured my vswitch back to Port ID load balancing, and my connection drop issue is gone.

So now I need to figure out what I did wrong in the first place. My Cisco switches are configured for src-dst-ip load balancing as was the port group on my vswitch. Anybody have an idea on this?

Thanks-

[zenomorph]

Hi there dTurner,

I'm having exactly the same problem - did you manage to find a solution? I've logged a call with VMware but they don't seem to know whats the issue.

Cheers

[dturner71]

Hi Zenomorph,

In our case it was the physical switches that were flaking out. They are Cisco 3750s and apparently our network vendor installed them with a dated version of the firmware. Once updated and rebooted everything worked fine.

[zenomorph]

dTurner,

Noted - many thanks for the reply.