v9 Behavior

[stmux]

All of our vm's are on the same LAN as the vCenter Server. Five of the server vm's have two NICS, local LAN and External through fierwall/Router. All of the vm's on local LAN 192.168.0.0 show as on (Same Subnet), however, the five servers with two NICS are showing (Different Subnet). Can someone please direct me to documentation that explains this process and why this is occurring.
Thanks,
mux

[foggy]

This comes down to guest interaction proxy selection. There's a chance that the same server is selected for all the VMs, however, for those five we compare subnets using the second NIC. We'd need logs to make sure, so please open a case with technical support. Thanks.

[Dark-Sider]

Hi,

I'm just setting up our veeam infrastructure. When performing some test-backups I noticed that our esxi-hosts behave differently.

To give a short insight on my setup: Three ESXi 6-hosts (let's name them X, Y, Z) managed through vcenter. The vcenter was added to veeam. I have three different vswitches on each host attached to the same three physical networks. Let's name them:
A: 10.10.0.0/16,
B: 10.20.0.0/16
C: 10.30.0.0/16

The veeam backup&replication VM only has access to network "C" and is running on host "Z". Each ESXi host has a management interface added to Networks A, B & C. (This is needed for different reasons).

The strange thing now that's happening:
- If I backup a VM on host "X" it uses a veeam proxy on the same subnet (which happens to be the veeam machine itself since no other proxys have been installed).
- However if I backup a VM on host "Y" it uses a veeam proxy on a different subnet (which also happens to be the veeam machine itself since no other proxys have been installed).

The only difference between hosts "X" and "Y" is the order in which the vmkernel-adapters are assigend to the networks.
Host X has network C as vmk0 and host Y has network C as vmk3.

So my guess is, (without changing vmk-orders around) that only vmk0 is used to determine on which subnet veeam could gain access to an ESXi host?

regards,

Fabian

[foggy]

Hello Fabian, are you talking about transport proxy or guest interaction proxy server selection? For the latter, we have another existing topic, but anyway, logs should be reviewed to explain the observed behavior, so I recommend opening a case for a closer look.

[Dark-Sider]

Hello,

I'm talking about the following messages (from the logfile):

Code: Select all

05.05.2016 17:02:20 :: No available proxies are running on ESX(i) management interface subnet. Using proxies from a different subnet, performance may be impacted. 
05.05.2016 17:02:34 :: Using guest interaction proxy XY-AD2.domain.de (Different subnet)

So it should be the guest interaction proxy.

I just "reorderd" the vmk-interfaces, so that the correct subnet is attached to vmk0 - but nothing changed. I'll open a ticket - and my case seems like the one you linked

[foggy]

I'll appreciate you sharing the case ID here, so we could track it further. Thanks.

[Dark-Sider]

Hi,

since I'm new to veeam I didn't know that there are really extensive logfiles stored on the veeam server. The ticket-creation-process pointed me at the log-file location.

I took the liberty and took a look in the log files. As it turns out, the proxy used for both ESX-hosts was always in the wrong subnet. The logfile also clearly states that it only tries one IP-Address, which happens to be the Host's "name" in vcenter. When I added the esxi-hosts I didn't use hostnames, but i used their IPs from one subnet. I removed and readded the hosts using their hostnames and created a "hosts"-entry for each machine on my veeam server. Now veeam sees the ESXi-hosts on the intended subnet.

I did not go forward to create a support ticket, as I was able to resolve this matter myself with the additonal information provided!

thx & regards,

Fabian

[EugeneK]

The communication with the nodes is always done through the interface the ESXi node's Hostname resolves to or the IP address it was added to Veeam with.
Having Hostname is preferred, in case you need to change the pointer IP in the future and do not want to remove/re-add the entire stack of servers to Veeam. If DNS cannot be changed for this purpose, the edits to "hosts" file on Veeam components VM(s) is sufficient.