Tag: Troubleshooting

Welcome to the third installment of my new NSX troubleshooting series. What I hope to do in these posts is share some of the common issues I run across from day to day. Each scenario will be a two-part post. The first will be an outline of the symptoms and problem statement along with bits of information from the environment. The second will be the solution, including the troubleshooting and investigation I did to get there.

NSX Troubleshooting Scenario 3

I’ll start off again with a brief customer problem description:

“We’ve recently deployed Cross-vCenter NSX for a remote datacenter location. All of the VMs at that location don’t have connectivity. They can’t ping their gateway, nor can they ping VMs on other hosts. Only VMs on the same host can ping each other.”

This is a pretty vague description of the problem, so let’s have a closer look at this environment. To begin, let’s look at the high-level physical interconnection between datacenters in the following diagram:

There isn’t a lot of detail above, but it helps to give us some talking points. The main location is depicted on the left. A three host cluster called compute-a exists there. All of the VLAN backed networks route through a router called vyos. The Universal Control Cluster exists at this location, as does the primary NSX manager.

Continue reading “NSX Troubleshooting Scenario 3”

Welcome to the second installment of a new series of NSX troubleshooting scenarios. This is the second half of scenario two, where I’ll perform some troubleshooting and resolve the problem.

Please see the first half for more detail on the problem symptoms and some scoping.

Getting Started

As mentioned in the first half, the problem is limited to a host called esx-a1. As soon as a guest moves to that host, it has no network connectivity. If we move a guest off of the host, its connectivity is restored.

We have one VM called win-a1 on host esx-a1 for testing purposes at the moment. As expected, the VM can’t be reached.

To begin, let’s have a look at the host from the CLI to figure out what’s going on. We know that the UI is reporting that it’s not prepared and that it doesn’t have any VTEPs created. In reality, we know a VTEP exists but let’s confirm.

To begin, we’ll check to see if any of the VIBs are installed on this host. With NSX 6.3.x, we expect to see two VIBs listed – esx-vsip and esx-vxlan.

Continue reading “NSX Troubleshooting Scenario 2 – Solution”

Welcome to the second half of ‘NSX Troubleshooting Scenario 1’ . For detail on the problem and some initial scoping, please see the first part of the scenario that I posted a few days ago. In this half, I’ll walk through some of the troubleshooting I did to find the underlying cause of this problem as well as the solution.

Where to Start?

The scoping done in the previous post gives us a lot of useful information, but it’s not always clear where to start. In my experience, it’s helpful to make educated ‘assertions’ based on what I think the issue is – or more often what I think the issue is not.

I’ll begin by translating the scoping observations into statements:

• It’s clear that basic L2/L3 connectivity is working to some degree. This isn’t a guarantee that there aren’t other problems, but it looks okay at a glance.
• We know that win-b1 and web-a1 are both on the same VXLAN logical switch. We also know they are in the same subnet, so that eliminates a lot of the routing as a potential problem. The DLR and ESGs should not really be in the picture here at all.
• The DFW is enabled, but looks to be configured with the default ‘allow’ rules only. It’s unlikely that this is a DFW problem, but we may need to prove this because the symptoms seem to be specific to HTTP.
• We also know that VMs in the compute-b cluster are having the same types of symptoms accessing internet based web sites. We know that the infrastructure needed to get to the internet – ESGs, physical routers etc– are all accessed via the compute-a cluster.
• It was also mentioned by the customer that the compute-b cluster was newly added. This may seem like an insignificant detail, but really increases the likelihood of a configuration or preparation problem.

Based on the testing done so far, the issue appears to be impacting a TCP service – port 80 HTTP. ICMP doesn’t seem impacted. We don’t know if other protocols are seeing similar issues.

Before we start health checking various NSX components, let’s do a bit more scoping to see if we can’t narrow this problem down even further. Right off the bat, the two questions I want answered are:

1. Are we really talking to the device we expect from a L2 perspective?
2. Is the problem really limited to the HTTP protocol?

Continue reading “NSX Troubleshooting Scenario 1 – Solution”

Welcome to the first of what I hope to be many NSX troubleshooting posts. As someone who has been working in back-line support for many years, troubleshooting is really the bread and butter of what I do every day. Solving problems in vSphere can be challenging enough, but NSX adds another thick layer of complexity to wrap your head around.

I find that there is a lot of NSX documentation out there but most of it is on to how to configure NSX and how it works – not a whole lot on troubleshooting. What I hope to do in these posts is spark some conversation and share some of the common issues I run across from day to day. Each scenario will hopefully be a two-part post. The first will be an outline of the symptoms and problem statement along with bits of information from the environment. The second will be the solution, including the troubleshooting and investigation I did to get there. I hope to leave a gap of a few days between the problem and solution posts to give people some time to comment, ask questions and provide their thoughts on what the problem could be!

NSX Troubleshooting Scenario 1

As always, let’s start with a somewhat vague customer problem description:

“Help! I’ve deployed a new cluster (compute-b) and for some reason I can’t access internal web sites on the compute-a cluster or at any other internet site.”

Of course, this is really only a small description of what the customer believes the problem to be. One of the key tasks for anyone working in support is to scope the problem and put together an accurate problem statement. But before we begin, let’s have a look at the customer’s environment to better understand how the new compute-b cluster fits into the grand scheme of things.

Continue reading “NSX Troubleshooting Scenario 1”