VirtualCenter VM IP Address Field Determination

[baptista]

Does anyone know how Virtual Center determines the IP Address field of a vm within the vi client? We have some vm's with multiple ip's bound to them for websites. On some of them VC seems to choose the last ip in the list, and on some others it seems to choose the first in the list. This is causing some problems with our VCB server and Netbackup since it requests a snapshot of the vm to be backed up by name using the reverse lookup of the ip address field in vc.

Robert

[baptista]

I believe I have found that it appears to use the 'lowest' ip in the assigned list. For example in the following ip list assigned to a nic10.56.87.42 will be the one listed in the 'IP Address' column.

10.56.87.128

10.56.87.42

10.56.87.79

10.56.87.158

10.56.87.57

Robert

[kjb007]

I went crazy about this in the past. What I've found is that the virtual center, retrieves the ip info from the database, in reverse creation order. That means, that the last LAN adaptor that you added to your vm, will be displayed in the IP segment field of the vc screen. You can test this by adding another adaptor, and setting the highest IP, it should still get displayed in the summary screen.

-KjB

[baptista]

Our vm's are using only one network adaptor with multiple bound ip's. So now that these are all virtual maybe my workaround is to create separate vnics for each ip instead of binding all to one. Then at least I can control which order I create them in.

Our biggest problem with this is how VCB and NetBackup resolve a vm name to get it backed up. It does a lookup of the ip address field and tries to snapshot that vm to back it up and VC tells it that the vm deos not exist.

Thanks for your info, haven't tried multi-nics.

Robert

[kjb007]

Your vm names should have the main IP registered as the vm name, and have the alternate IP addresses as different hostnames. That way, resolution should not be a problem. With all IPs on the same NIC, usually one is used as the main, management IP, and the others are "virtual", in case you needed to run multiple websites, and share the webserver.

As long your vm hostname matches the main IP address, and only one IP address, you should be fine with VCB and NetBackup.

-KjB

[baptista]

Yeh we bind multiple ip's to one nic for websites like you mentioned. The problem is VC (or vmtools) doesn't pull out the main ip, it pulls out the 'lowest' bound to the nic. So for some of our vm's we have to backup the 'website' so it will snapshot the vm and take it to tape, which gets confusing for some of the admins, especially since some of them the main server ip is the lowest so it functions as expected.

Robert