vMotion interface in NSX segment or vCenter portgroup?

[mdrzik]

I have collapsed cluster design with 2 pNics and one VDS 7.0 switch.

Mgmt vmkernel using vCenter managed portgroup. I tried add also vMotion vmk to vcenter managed portgroup with MTU 9000. But I have problems with random vMotion failures:
vMotion migration  failed to receive 36/36 bytes from the remote host: Connection closed by remote host, possibly due to timeout vMotion migration
Also vmkping -I vmk1  -s 8972  192.168.x.x  have 100% packet loss
So I tried to create segment in NSX for vMotion and assign to vmotion vmkernel interface. After that it is without failures.
My question is if using nsx segment for vmkernel is correct ?

[Francois Tallet]

Your vmkernel interface is sending IP traffic that is routed and that does not need an overlay segment in oder reach beyond a rack (or whatever the span of the VLAN to which it is attached is.) So the vMotion operation does not need NSX and the vMotion vmkernel interface does not need to be attached to a segment. In fact, VMware does not support attaching vmkernel interfaces to overlay segments.

That said, the VM being vMotioned might need to be attached to an overlay, but that's not your question;-)

[mdrzik]

I am using VLAN transportzone configured segment for vmotion, not overlay. My question is, if this is supported ?

[pcgeek2009]

We run VCF all typical kernel networks like management, vMotion, VSAN, etc are not segments within NSX. These are all your normal vDS's. 

[Francois Tallet]

We used to attach vmks to VLAN segments on the NVDS.  Since NSX on vDS, we ask users to attach them on "standard DVPGs", meaning, the regular DVPG of the VDS. We're in fact hoping to deprecate the NSX VLAN segments in the future. I'm not sure what this means for support (because support team tend to be strict on those kinds of things), but I can tell you that there should be no difference between standard DVPG and NSX VLAN DVPG for your vmk attachement.

There is one area where this is important though. In the above diagram, you have an edge VM running on a host prepared for NSX. You need to attach this VM to NSX VLAN trunk DVPGs, a standard trunk DVPG would not work (at least for now.) This is very specific to the edge VM. Again, there should be no difference for your vMotion vmk.

Are you sure the NSX VLAN segment and the standard DVPG you tested vMotion with were using the same physical uplinks? They have different teaming policies.

regards,

Francois