Hello:
I have two hosts (esx01 and esx02) running ESXi 5.5 that are connected to the same vDS 5.1. I have no issues passing traffic between VM's that are on the different hosts and in the same port group, so I know the vDS is doing what it is supposed to. Each host has 8 vmnic's and the vDS has 8 uplinks, all set to active.
However, when I setup a distributed port mirroring on the vDS and choose a source port and destination port, I only get the mirrored traffic on the destination port if the ports are on the same host. If the source and destination are on different hosts, no mirror traffic is received.
I have sort of worked around it by using the following https://everythingshouldbevirtual.com/vmware-vds-rspan-port-mirroring, however, that ends up giving me a lot of duplicated packets when I attach it to a single uplink (presumably as the switch is seeing the traffic ingress/egress on both vmnic's in the vDS uplink? For each packet I see 8 duplicates.
But it seems to me that this should "just work" without having to do anything switch side. I've also tried looking at: vSphere 5.1 – VDS Feature Enhancements – Port Mirroring – Part 3 | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs., but with that it seems those are in completed separated vDS which in that case an RSPAN makes sense at the switch level to pass the traffic. But in my case it is a single switch sitting between two hosts that are connected to the same vDS.
Any thoughts or directions to help guide me to the answer would be greatly appreciated!
Josh