dvswitch ports exceeded maxports

[pan1268]

Hi

Just wanted to know more details about the stats shown in the dvswitch summary page specifically "Total Ports and Avaialble ports", another point i wanted to make here is that few days before i was getting error while creating a dvportgroup The error says something like this "  8608 in spec exceeded maxPorts 8192" . I found a vmware KB  1038193 to workaround with this problem. Before I could fix this problem by using the KB , I happen to add few more ESX hosts to the environment. Later when i tried adding the port group I was able to do so without any error; just wandering is it because of adding new ESX hosts.

cheers

[rickardnobel]

How many portgroups do you actually have and how many ports per existing portgroup?

[pan1268]

Hi,

We have 39 Port groups and I can  see against each port group we have 248 "total ports" and "avaiable ports" varies (not sure how it varies - because it dows not match the count of the VM i have in that port group).

Another thing i have noticed is the port group which i have recently created is got created with 128  "total ports". And, when i have tried increasing the number of ports it gave the same error. Just could not understand the concept here.

Hope this information helps. Please help me to understand the concept here.

Cheers

[rickardnobel]

pan1268 wrote:

We have 39 Port groups and I can  see against each port group we have 248 "total ports" and "avaiable ports" varies

There are certain maximums that you likely have reached here. On a single host you can have 4096 virtual switch ports. With your 39 portgroups each with a high number of ports you will get into this maximum.

How many virtual machines do you really have?

Do you actually need space for 248 VMs on each portgroup? Perhaps you should get into the portgroup config and decrease the numbers to perhaps 64 ports per portgroups for all of them.

[pan1268]

Hi

Many thanks for your reply, It is very helpfull, apologies for me acting late.

Actually we have around 12-15 VMs in per port group. And, would like to know how easier it will be to decrease the number of
ports in the port group i mean to say will there be any probability of causing the problems to the VM in the port group.

Also, would like to understand how we calculate the figure that we have reached the maximum limit.

Once again many thanks for your answers.

Cheers

[MKguy]

It might be best (for consistent numbering of Ports too) if you create a new dvSwitch with those port groups but less ports, assign one uplink of your existing dvSwitch to it, and then use the migrate networking function to attach the VMs to the new dvSwitch. This will usually cause a single ping-loss.

The exact configuration maximums are outlined here:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r50/vsphere-50-configuration-maximums.pdf

vSphere Standard and Distributed Switch
Total virtual network switch ports per host (VDS and VSS ports) 4096
Maximum active ports per host (VDS and VSS) 1016
Virtual network switch creation ports per standard switch 4088
Port groups per standard switch 256
Distributed virtual network switch ports per vCenter 30000
Static port groups per vCenter 5000
Ephemeral port groups per vCenter 256
Hosts per VDS 350
Distributed switches per vCenter 32

[rickardnobel]

pan1268 wrote:

Actually we have around 12-15 VMs in per port group. And, would like to know how easier it will be to decrease the number of

ports in the port group i mean to say will there be any probability of causing the problems to the VM in the port group.

I think you should be able to just decrease the number of ports in the portgroups without problems for the guests, however I have no Distributed Switch available for testing this at the moment.

This VMware KB mentions nothing of potential issues: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1010593

As long as you keep well above the actual number of VMs it should be fine. Say that you decrease the number to 64 ports per portgroup, this would leave a lot of room for future VMs as well as going under the 4096 port limit per host.