8 Responses

  1. Cwjking
    Cwjking at |

    Very good write up. I am currently working on some designs and standards. I really dislike making one-off configurations but if avoid potential downtime it makes it all worth it. I also have to agree that a "workaround" is not really a solution. Even so, I am pretty impressed that only a few things have come to surface for v5. They really spent a good while making this one of the best versions they have every pushed out. Thanks for taking the time and writing this up. Time to go update docs. 🙂

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      I agree. vSphere 5 has been one of the most solid releases. There are very few issues that have come out, and those that have are either issues that have been around for a long time (such as this one), that have workarounds, or are minor. But this is exactly what we expect from Infrastructure software that is underpinning ever more critical systems.

      Reply
  2. vSphere 5 HA Complete Failure Experience « Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] All Paths Down events would occur, and situations such as the one described in my post The Achilles Heel of the VMware Distributed Switch could happen. As the majority of my storage (before the CX500) as well as all of my systems are […]

  3. vCenter on DVS: Chicken or the egg syndrome. | virtualbdotme

    […] The Achilles Heel of the Virtual Distributed Switch Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in VMware and tagged business crtical, Distributed Switch, management ports, vCenter, vCenter Outage, vDS, VMware by budgi645. Bookmark the permalink. […]

  4. Auto Start Breaks in 5.0 Update 1 – Not Just Free vSphere Hypervisor Version « Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] So before I tell you why this has happened I’m going to tell you why I used Auto Start in the first place in an HA/DRS Cluster. Simple answer, as you can see from the screenshot above, I have HP P4000 VSA’s configured on local storage on each host. I was knowingly using Auto Start even though it wasn’t supported. This was to get my storage back up and running in the case of a host reboot. In an attempt to avoid the problem I described in my article The Achilles Heel of the VMware Distributed Switch. […]

  5. Andrew
    Andrew at |

    Excellent writeup! Bookmarked too.

    Reply
  6. BluRayOfDeath
    BluRayOfDeath at |

    I wish had seen this article earlier, I had the call last night "We have a Black Hawk Down!!". We run with a VPLEX environment so a Active/Active data center. There was some power work being down in one DC so we migrated all the VM's to the other site. All good until the power work went wrong and blacked out the site. Vplex worked fine and was working at the other site as planned, but the vDS had a complete meltdown, which we then find vCenter Heartbeat is connected to vDS. Still investigating but it also looks like the hosts weren't looking at the correct site for the datastore???? and hence we had the perfect storm. Our workaround was to reconnect Heartbeat back to a standard switch in order for it to start which the got vDS working again. So all in all a complete cock up.

    Reply
  7. My very weird lab issue – a not fun lab story | Notes from MWhite

    […] happened and how to mitigate in the future if it happens again.  First via Michael Webster I found this, which is old but still educational, and from Duncan Epping I found this and this.  Again very […]

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