I have an ESX 5.1 cluster of 3 ESX 5.1 Hosts,
The vDS (5.1) is set up so that it has 1 uplink port only that is tied to the vmnic0 on the hosts.
I want to add in a second uplink port tied to vmnic2 that will be used to RSPAN traffic out to a remote traffic analyzer.
I have all NIC teaming, and failover turned off for the switch and port group.
I Create a new uplink port on the vDS without a problem,
Then I associate vmnic2 to the the new Uplink port. When I press save, the task goes off and tries to propagate this change to the host.
But I get a failure warning me that this action would take the Host off line, so it rolls back the change
I can associate the Uplink Port to the Physical NIC if I log onto the ESX CLI and set the NIC down.
$esccli network nic down -n vmnic2
Then I can use the GUI to associate that down vmnic2 to the port group.
However if I then set that NIC to active, the ESX Host disconnects from the Cluster and I have to use the Console to reset the VDS and and force the NIC to use the proper Uplink port.
However Both adapters appear to share the same IP. The RSPAN uplink port is connected in such away that no traffic or ipaddress should get set on this NIC, also in some cases I have tried to Uplink NIC is directly connected to a traffic analyzer.
This appears to work Although I have some odd routing and DHCP issues for some VMs (Some work great) and hosts -- I'll write more on this in a different post.
This whole setup seems incorrect. I can't find any documentation that states how to add an uplink port to an already existing vDS. I do find documentation that states "uplink ports can be added later ".
How do I add an Uplink port and associate it to a Host's interface for RSPAN ? This is one of the big new additions to 5.1 and it seems very difficult/impossible to set up correctly.