VMWare vSphere Cloning/Management Network

blueboy2001

blueboy2001

blueboy2001

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
4,898
I'm trying to troubleshoot an issue that when we clone a VM in VMWare vCenter 5.1, it causes our LAN to grind to a halt - despite all the storage being on a separate 10GbE network.

I don't know much about the mechanics of vSphere, but can anyone confirm something I've read tonight that when you clone a VM all the data runs over the management network for the cluster?

If that's right, it explains the problem. I think the management network runs over the LAN switches. Does the management network need access to anything other than the hosts?
 
Thanks guys. We've had further problems this week with everything grinding to a halt during normal day to day operations.

We might have been barking up the wrong tree with the cloning issue being related to the network. vMotion is checked on the 2x 10GbE NIC team used for the storage connection - this is on a separate set of switches to the LAN. Whilst I'm not convinced this is a good configuration as it could cause contention between storage and vmotion, it shouldn't be hammering the LAN. I've ordered 2 new ESX hosts with 4 10GbE ports, and an extra 10GbE card for each of our existing boxes and we'll have vmotion on a separate vlan with separate interfaces.

The problem appears to stem from our storage. We had 2 NFS datastores (named capacity and performance), one running on a big aggregate using 48 15k SAS disks and another running on another aggregate with 12x 2TB SATA disks. The SATA disks also serve CIFS for 600 users home drives, profiles, department shares etc. We've ended up with 30 VM's running on capacity, plus its used for our VM templates and ISO store. The disks were maxing out and causing huge latency, which was causing timeouts all over the place. I suspect the same issue has been occuring during cloning.

We're moving all the VM's off SATA for now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom