1000v Uplinks to 2x Cisco 4500 & vPC-HM

[allannelson]

Hi All,

I have been testing a 1000v setup recently and have everything working as I wanted. I have 8 pNIC's connecting to 2 switches (4+4). I am using vPC-HM on the Nexus and just a standard PC on each of the 4500's. All control, packet, management, and data traffic go over these. I have no vSwitches left in the environment, just the DVS. I have 2 physical hosts in the environment at the moment.

I wanted to do some tests to make sure if the whole environment had to be turned off, if it would all come back up again.

I shut everything doen, and then power on the hosts. I was able to connect to the service consoles, so the System VLAN's seemed to work fine. I then started up the VSM (primary first), and when it came up, there were lots of errors:

Some are below:

2009 Dec 30 11:10:56 ESXvSwitch %KERN-1-SYSTEM_MSG: Dropping received frames from duplicate VSM saddr (0x1010000) - kernel

2009 Dec 30 11:10:12 ESXvSwitch %PLATFORM-2-MOD_PWRUP: Module 4 powered up (Serial number )
2009 Dec 30 11:10:20 ESXvSwitch %PLATFORM-2-PFM_VEM_REMOVE_NO_HB: Removing VEM 4 (heartbeats lost)
2009 Dec 30 11:10:20 ESXvSwitch %PLATFORM-2-MOD_REMOVE: Module 4 removed (Serial number )

2009 Dec 30 11:10:50 ESXvSwitch %PLATFORM-2-MOD_PWRUP: Module 3 powered up (Serial number )
2009 Dec 30 11:11:00 ESXvSwitch %PLATFORM-2-PFM_VEM_REMOVE_NO_HB: Removing VEM 3 (heartbeats lost)
2009 Dec 30 11:11:00 ESXvSwitch %PLATFORM-2-MOD_REMOVE: Module 3 removed (Serial number )

Module 3 and 4 are the 2 VEM's.

I checked the PC status on the Nexus and did a little bit of troubleshooting and in the end, I disabled all ports on one of the 4500's to each of the hosts. So now I only had 8x ports from one 4500 going to the 2 hosts. (no redundant path). Both modules then came up and all the errors stopped. I left it for a few min and then un-shut the ports on the other 4500, and everything is back to normal.

Now the only thing I can think of that is causing this is Spanning Tree that is running on the 4500.

I cant turn off spanning tree across the whole swithc, but I think i may need to turn it off/disable it for just the ports going to the Nexus.

Can anyone confirm that this is what I should do, and also what is the best command to do this (bpdufilter? would portfast trunk work?).

I have attached a Visio layout of the setup (ignore the 3rd host, as there will be another added at a later date).

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards

Allan

[allannelson]

Thanks Nenduri.

Everything is up and running now.

I will see how it all goes.

Thanks for the help.

Regards

Allan

[abdikhamit]

Hi Allan.

I have the same problem on my Nexus. Please could you provide what did you done on your nexus

[allannelson]

Hi abdikhamit,

I used the suggestion found in post 8 (instead of using CDP port Groups, I used MAC Pinning)

I did have trouble getting the command to work, but it was due to the fact it was not available in the version I was using. I ended up upgrading my software to the latest version at the time. (Post 13 has some details).

Hope that helps.

Allan

[abdikhamit]

Hi Allan.

I made as you suggested. Everytihng is working and up. Thank you