Sending monitoring traffic to an analyzer vapp hosted in an ESXi host within HP Bladesystem c7000

[Damian_Rivas]

Hi all, 

I am trying a network traffic analyzer (DDI) in virtual appliance format. It is hosted in a vSphere cluster installed in a HP Bladesystem c7000 with Virtual Connect.

I want to analyze all my physical network traffic, so for that purpose I connected a port (intended as monitoring port to receive all mirrored traffic) from de Core Switch (HP 7506) directly to a free interface in the Virtual Connect.

I created a SUS for the specified interface which shows as Linked and recognize the correct port of the Core Switch in which it is connected. And added the associated networks to an available interface in all Server Profiles.

On the VMWare side I've created a dedicated virtual switch with the VC interface as uplink, created a port group in promiscuous mode and added the vNIC to the virtual appliance. Until here everything is fine.

Now, my problem is that whenever I enable the port mirroring on the core switch (configuring the port as monitor) the SUS uplink state changes from Linked/Active to Linked/Standby and traffic stops passing to the VMware infrastructure. If I disable monitoring on the core switch port, it returns to Linked/Active status.

I have no clue what to do, something seems to be wrong between the core switch and the VC. Anyone experienced something similar?

Any help will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!