Nested Lab - Can't deploy NSX Edge - Help

[bape1892]

Looking for some assistance please.  I have a nested ESXi lab set up and was hoping to learn NSX-T.  I have an NSX manager installed on my physical esxi host and I am trying to deploy an Edge node on the nested VM.   When I try to deploy the Edge, the "Configuration State" says "Failed" with reason being that "mac address for a vnic fp-eth0 is not found on edge node".

I have allowed MAC address changes, forged transmits and promiscous mode on the Distributed Switch. 

In my research into this, I have also read that I should enabled Huge Pages.  I have tried both "sched.mem.lpage.enable1GPage - TRUE" and "featMask.vm.cpuid.pdpe1gb (Val:1)".  When I use the "featMask.vm.cpuid.pdpe1gb" parameter - the VM fails to power on. 

I have also tried deploying manually using the OVA however I still have no luck in getting the VM to power on after setting the "featMask.vm.cpuid.pdpe1gb " parameter.

 

Has anyone overcome this frustrating issue?

 

My set up is as follows:

 

On the Physical ESXi Host: (Dell R720 - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630) : 

vCenter appliance - 7.0.3

NSX Manager 3.2.0.1.0.19232594

3 x VM's with ESXi 7.0.3 installed (These are the nested VM's which will ultimately act as transport nodes)

 

On the Nested ESXi Hosts:

1 cluster (EVC disabled)

Edge VM

[bape1892]

bump - anybody?

 

[JaSo2]

IF the problem is about the huge pages then you should check the physical processor - check if it has a corresponding flag (pdpe1gb). It seems the Sandy bridge generation lacks this support (then it doesn't matter if you enable huge pages support as long as your underlaying processor does not support it).

 

[bape1892]

so if my underlying CPU doesn't support it - then I can't enable hugepages in the nested level?  What are my alternatives to deploy an NSX edge?  I've tried a 'nested bare metal' install too and that seems to fail also

[JaSo2]

Have you tried the previous version also? According to this https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-NSX-Discussions/NSX-T-3-2-on-vSphere-7u3c-Hugepage-issues-on-Edge-VMs/td-p/2894117 the previous version works (there is 3.0 mentioned, but I would go with 3.1.3.5 - that is the latest 3.1.3 version where I did not encounter any issue).

J.

[bape1892]

Would there be an issue using a newer NSX manager version and an older NSX edge?  Or should I keep both to the same version?

Also - where do I check for the pdpe1gb flag?

[bape1892]

I have tried this and have managed to successfully deploy an Edge node.  Thank you so much!

[JaSo2]

Keep same version - deploy edges through Managers when you connect Managers to vCenter (Compute Manager).

I'm not sure about the easiest way to do it through ESXi host, but through for example Linux Machine you could see the CPU info through command:

cat /proc/cpuinfo then I would grep with the selected flag (cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep pdpe1gb) - you can find more usable commands for huge pages through google, I'm no expert for it :).