Hi,
I've hit a problem with our vSphere 5 DVS confguration on our internal lab; we've been provisioning (via powershell) linked clones of VMs and suddenly (and seemingly randomly) hit a DVS port provisioning failure with a generic and bland error message along the lines of:
Wait-Task: The operation for the entity VirtualMachine-vm-5131 failed with the following message:
"A general system error occurred: vDS host error: see faultCause"
FaultCause tells me nothing. We're using ephemeral port binding, as I hit this issue 6 months ago and converted all dvPGs across from static/dynamic to ephemeral to try and resolve the problem and eliminate port group port exhaustion as a root cause. This worked fine, until now.
Digging into the issue a little further, this problem seemed to be related to a specifc host. I compared / contrasted to other hosts in the same cluster and identified a potential cause; the net-dvs output indicates that each host allocates a limited number of ports for each DVS:
/etc/vmware # net-dvs | grep 'max ports'
max ports: 256
and I was using almost all of them on this problem host…
/etc/vmware # net-dvs | grep '.*port [0-9]*:.*' | wc -l
253
So, to my question; how can I increase the number of DVS ports that are allocated to a DVS on a given host? I see an argument to the net-dvs command which (seemingly) allows you to set the number of ports which could be the fix…
~ # net-dvs -h
Warning: This is an unsupported command. Use at your own risk.
net-dvs -a [ -P maxPorts] switch_name
Hmmm … don’t like the look of that warning… before I try this out does anyone have any experience or guidance on how to use the net-dvs command?
Thanks,
JD