So today was the fourth time during a very limited time frame the ESXi host VXLAN VIB installation failed when trying to enable the VXLAN functionality. When using the installation procedure for VXLAN documented here i’m not even reaching the part (Figure 6 in the provided link) when the ESXi hosts VMkernel Interfaces (Virtual Adapters/vmk) are created for the ESXi hosts included in the vSphere cluster. The below figure shows my “Network Connectivity for VXLAN traffic” status which is “Not ready” for both the vSphere Cluster itself and all the individual ESXi hosts.
My VXLAN VIB installation failures depends on a couple of things e.g. DNS name resolution, Firewall port blocked, corrupt vxlan.zip file. One way to identify a failed VXLAN VIB installation (corrupt VXLAN.zip file) is to monitor the ESXi host update log “esxupdate.log” which is located in the directory /var/log/. Look for e.g.:
- An esxupdate error exception was caught:
- esxupdate: ERROR: MetadataDownloadError
I have not found an explanation to why the vxlan.zip file gets corrupt while being uploaded via vCenter Server but this is how you can manually install the VIB.
- Download the VIB directly from the vCNS Manager using the link https://vCNS-Mgr-IP/bin/vdn/vibs/5.1/vxlan.zip and not the link found in the esxupdate.log file which points to the vCenter Server)
- Enable the SSH service for the ESXi hosts.
- Upload the VXLAN.zip file to the ESXi hosts /tmp directory.
- Log on to the ESXi host using SSH and perform the VXLAN VIB installaton using the command syntax “esxcli software vib install –depot=”path to vxlan.zip file“.
See below figure regarding the installation command and the installation result which in this case was successful.
- When the VXLAN VIB installation is finished, go back to the vCNS Manager web interface and pressed the “Reslove” button. When the ESXi hosts VMkernel Interfaces (Virtual Adapters/vmk) are created they are set to use DHCP based (default behavior) IP information. No DHCP server was available in this case and that’s why we receive the result “Not ready” presented in the figure below
.
- Set the IP information per ESXi hosts VMkernel Interface (Virtual Adapters/vmk) used for VXLAN and press the “Resolve” button once more and you’ll get the result presented in the figure below.
Now the VXLAN configuration is finished and you can take advantage of the feature in e.g. vCloud Director.
Marco Broeken (@mbroeken) wrote a blog post, which can be found here , about how to install the VXLAN VIB using VMware vCenter Update Manager (VUM) so this blog post is an alternative if you do not have a VUM server available (which i didn’t in my case) or if you prefer to use the command line option.