Tag Archives: Switch Independent

Trouble Shooting Intermittent Virtual Machine Network Connectivity

Posted on by
Reply

I was asked to take a look at an issue with virtual machines losing network connectivity. The problems were described as follows:

Sometimes some VMs had connectivity, some times they didn’t. It was not tied to specific virtual machines. Sometimes the problem was not there, than it showed up again. It was, not an issue of a wrong subnet mask or gateway.

They suspected firmware or driver issues. Maybe it was a Windows NIC teaming bug or problems with DVMQ or NIC offload settings. There’s a lot of potential reasons, just Google Intermittent VM connectivity Issues Hyper-V and you’ll get a truckload of options.

So a round of wishful firmware, driver upgrading started. Followed by a round of wishful disabling network features. That’s one way to do it. But why not sit back an look at the issue.

Based on what they said I looked at the environment and asked it was tied to specific host as only VMs on one of the hosts had the issue.  Could it be be after a live migration or a VM restart. They didn’t really know but it could. So we started looking at the hosts. All teams for the vSwitch were correctly configured on all host. No tagged VLAN on the member NIC. No extra team interfaces that would violate the rule that there can be only one if the team is used by a Hyper-V switch. They used the switch independent teaming mode with the load balancing mode set to Dynamic, all member active. Perfect.

I asked it they used tagged VLAN on the VMs some times. They said yes. Which gave me a clue they had trunking or general mode configured on the ports. So I looked at the switches to see what the port configuration was like?  Guess what. All ports on both switches were correctly configured bar the ports of the vSwitch team members on one Hyper-V host. The one with problematic VMs. The two ports were in general mode but the port on the top switch had PVID* 100 and the one on the bottom switch had PVID 200. That was the issue. If the VM “landed” on the team member with PVID 200 it has no network connectivity.

HyperV-vSwitchTeam-WronNativeVLAN

 

* PVID (switchport general pvid 200) is the default VLAN of the port, in CISCO speak that would translate into “”native VLAN as in switchport trunk native vlan 200

Yes NIC firmware and drivers have issues. There are bugs or problems with advanced features once in a while. But you really do need to check that the configuration is correct and the design or setup makes sense. Do yourself a favor by not assuming anything. Trust but verify.

In Defense of Switch Independent Teaming With Hyper-V

Posted on by
Reply

For many old timers (heck, that includes me) NIC teaming with LACP mode was the best of the best, at least when it comes to teaming options. Other modes often led to passive/active, less than optimal receiving network traffic aggregation. Basically, and perhaps over simplified, I could say the other options were only used if you had no other choice to get things to work. Which we did a lot … I used Intel’s different teaming modes for various reasons in the past (before we had MLAG, VLT, VPC, …). Trying to use LACP where possible was a good approach in the past in physical deployments and early virtualized environments when 1Gbps networking dominated the datacenter realm and Windows did not have native support for LBFO.

But even LACP, even in those days, had some drawbacks. It’s the most demanding form of teaming. For one it required switch stacking. This demands the same brand and type of switches and that means you have no redundancy during firmware upgrades. That’s bad, as the only way to work around that is to move all workload to another rack unit … if you even had the capability to do that! So even in days past we chose different models if teaming out of need or because of the above limitations for high availability. But the superiority of NIC teaming with LACP still stands for many and as modern switches support MLAG, VLT, etc. the drawback of stacking can be avoided. So does that mean LACP for NIC teaming is always the superior choice today?

Some argue it is and now they have found support in the documentation about Microsoft CPS system documentation about Microsoft CPS system. Look, even if Microsoft chose to use LACP in their solutions it’s based on their particular design and the needs of that design I do not concur that this is the best overall. It is however a valid & probably the choice for their specific setup. While I applaud the use of MLAG (when available to you a no or very low cost) to have all bases covered but it does not mean that LACP is the best choice for the majority of use cases with Hyper-V deployments. Microsoft actually agrees with me on this in their Windows Server 2012 R2 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management guide. They state that Switch Independent configuration / Dynamic distribution (or Hyper-V Port if on Hyper-V and if not on W2K12R2)  is the best possible default choice is for teaming in both native and Hyper-V environments. I concur, even if perhaps not that strong for native workloads (it depends). Exceptions to this:

  • Teaming is being performed in a VM (which should be rare),
  • Switch dependent teaming (e.g., LACP) is required by policy, or
  • Operation of a two-member Active/Standby team is required by policy.

In other words in 2 out of 3 cases the reason is a policy, not a technical superior solution …

Note that there are differences between Address Hash, Hyper-V Port mode & the new dynamic distribution modes and the latter has made things better in W2K12R2 in regards to bandwidth but you’ll need the read the white papers. Use dynamic as default, it is the best. Also note that LACP/Switch Dependent doesn’t mean you can send & receive to and from a VM over the aggregated bandwidth of all team members. Life is more complicated than that. So if that’s you’re main reason for switch dependent, and think you’re done => be ware Winking smile.

Switch Independent is also way better for optimization of VMQ. You have more queues available (sum-of-queues) and the IO path is very predictable & optimized.

If you don’t control the switches there’s a lot more cross team communication involved to set up teaming for your hosts. There’s more complexity in these configurations so more possibilities for errors or bugs. Operational ease is also a factor.

The biggest draw back could be that for receiving traffic you cannot get more than the bandwidth a single team member can deliver. That’s true but optimizing receiving traffic has it’s own demands and might not always be that great if the switch configuration isn’t that smart & capable. Do I ever miss the potential ability to aggregate incoming traffic. In real life I do not (yet) but in some configurations it could do a great job to optimize that when needed.

When using 10Gbps or higher you’ll rarely be in a situation where receiving traffic is higher than 10Gbps or higher and if you want to get that amount of traffic you really need to leverage DVMQ. And a as said switch independent teaming with port of dynamic mode gives you the most bang for the buck. as you have more queues available. This drawback is mitigated a bit by the fact that modern NICs have way larger number of queues available than they used to have. But if you have more than one VM that is eating close to 10Gbps in a non lab environment and you planning to have more than 2 of those on a host you need to start thinking about 40Gbps instead of aggregating a fistful of 10Gbps cables. Remember the golden rules a single bigger pipe is always better than a bunch of small pipes.

When using 1Gbps you’ll be at that point sooner and as 1Gbps isn’t a great fit for (Dynamic) VMQ anyway I’d say, sure give LACP a spin to try and get a bit more bandwidth but will it really matter? In native workloads it might but with a vSwith?  Modern CPUs eat 1Gbps NICs for breakfast, so I would not bother with VMQ. But when you’re tied to 1Gbps it’s probably due to budget constraints and you might not even have stackable, MLAG, VLT or other capable switches. But the arguments can be made, it depends (see Don’t tell me “It depends”! But it does!). But in any case I start saving for 10Gbps Smile

Today as the PC8100 series and the N4000 Series (budget 10Gbps switches, yes I know “budget” is relative but in the 10Gbps world, but they offer outstanding value for money), I tend to set up MLAG with two of these per rack. This means we have all options and needs covered at no extra cost and without sacrificing redundancy under any condition. However look at the needs of your VMs and the capability of your NICs before using LACP for teaming by default. The fact that switch independent works with any combination of budget switches to get redundancy doesn’t mean it’s only to be used in such scenarios. That’s a perk for those without more advanced gear, not a consolation price.

My best advise: do not over engineer it. Engineer it for the best possible solution for the environment at hand. When choosing a default it’s not about the best possible redundancy and bandwidth under certain conditions. It’s about the best possible redundancy and bandwidth under most conditions. It’s there that switch independent comes into it’s own, today more than ever!

There is one other very good, but luckily also a very rare case where LACP/Switch dependent will save you and switch independent won’t: dead switch ports, where the port becomes dysfunctional. So while switch independent protects against NIC, Switch, cable failures, here it doesn’t help you as it doesn’t know (it’s about link failures, not logical issues on a port).

For the majority of my Hyper-V deployments I do not use switch dependent / LACP. The situation where I did had to do with Windows NLB in combination with ICMP Multicast.

Note: You can do VLT, MLAG, stacking and still leverage switch independent teaming, LACP or static switch dependent is NOT mandatory even when possible.

Design Considerations For Converged Networking On A Budget With Switch Independent Teaming In Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

Posted on by
16

Last Friday I was working on some Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V networking designs and investigating the benefits & drawbacks of each. Some other fellow MVPs were also working on designs in that area and some interesting questions & answers came up (thank you Hans Vredevoort for starting the discussion!)

You might have read that for low cost, high value 10Gbps networks solutions I find the switch independent scenarios very interesting as they keep complexity and costs low while optimizing value & flexibility in many scenarios. Talk about great ROI!

So now let’s apply this scenario to one of my (current) favorite converged networking designs for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Two dual NIC LBFO teams. One to be used for virtual machine traffic and one for other network traffic such as Cluster/CSV/Management/Backup traffic, you could even add storage traffic to that. But for this particular argument that was provided by Fiber Channel HBAs. Also with teaming we forego RDMA/SR-IOV.

For the VM traffic the decision is rather easy. We go for Switch Independent with Hyper-V Port mode. Look at Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management to read why. The exceptions mentioned there do not come into play here and we are getting great virtual machine density this way. With lesser density 2-4 teamed 1Gbps ports will also do.

But what about the team we use for the other network traffic. Do we use Address hash or Hyper-V port mode. Or better put, do we use native teaming with tNICs as shown below where we can use DCB or Windows QoS?

image

Well one drawback here with Address Hash is that only one member will be used for incoming traffic with a switch independent setup. Qos with DCB and policies isn’t that easy for a system admin and the hardware is more expensive.

So could we use a virtual switch here as well with QoS defined on the Hyper-V switch?

image

Well as it turns out in this scenario we might be better off using a Hyper-V Switch with Hyper-V Port mode on this Switch independent team as well. This reaps some real nice benefits compared to using a native NIC team with address hash mode:

  • You have a nice load distribution of the different vNIC’s send/receive traffic over a single member of the NIC team per VM. This way we don’t get into a scenario where we only use one NIC of the team for incoming traffic. The result is a better balance between incoming and outgoing traffic as long an none of those exceeds the capability of one of the team members.
  • Easy to define QoS via the Hyper-V Switch even when you don’t have network gear that supports QoS via DCB etc.
  • Simplicity of switch configuration (complexity can be an enemy of high availability & your budget).
  • Compared to a single Team of dual 10Gbps ports you can get a lot higher number of VM density even they have rather intensive network traffic and the non VM traffic gets a lots of bandwidth as well.
  • Works with the cheaper line of 10Gbps switches
  • Great TCO & ROI

With a dual 10Gbps team you’re ready to roll. All software defined. Making the switches just easy to use providers of connectivity. For smaller environments this is all that’s needed. More complex configurations in the larger networks might be needed high up the stack but for the Hyper-V / cloud admin things can stay very easy and under their control. The network guys need only deal with their realm of responsibility and not deal with the demands for virtualization administration directly.

I’m not saying DCB, LACP, Switch Dependent is bad, far from. But the cost and complexity scares some people while they might not even need. With the concept above they could benefit tremendously from moving to 10Gbps in a really cheap and easy fashion. That’s hard (and silly) to ignore. Don’t over engineer it, don’t IBM it and don’t go for a server rack phD in complex configurations. Don’t think you need to use DCB, SR-IOV, etc. in every environment just because you can or because you want to look awesome. Unless you have a real need for the benefits those offer you can get simplicity, performance, redundancy and QoS in a very cost effective way. What’s not to like. If you worry about LACP etc. consider this, Switch independent mode allows for nearly no service down time firmware upgrades compared to stacking. It’s been working very well for us and avoids the expense & complexity of vPC, VLT and the likes of that. Life is good.