Virtual Connect and reserved VLANs?

[chuckk281]

Edvard was having problems with certain VLAN numbers:

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The main issue was that my customer couldn’t use a specific VLAN in their ESX environment together with Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules today (latest vc firmware and latest esxi 4.1 u1  hp edition ). The VLAN was 1003 and every time we tried to set this VLAN to a specific port group we got all kinds of mysterious issues with connectivity, ghost VM:s, host failures etc.

We finally switch the VLAN to another VLAN ID in the entire network includes switches, vc modules and ESX and everything were suddenly working perfectly.

Is VLAN 1003 used internally by the VC modules? Have anyone experience this problem before.

My customer were using VLAN 1003 before in a ESX environment with the same blade (bl 490c) BUT with GBe2 switches before switching to Virtual Connect and that have been running flawless for years…

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From Gergo:

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VLANs 1001-1005 are reserved VLANs in the switches generally. There are switches that can not use this reserved section (ex. Cisco 6500 and some HPN switches) and there are switches that omit this reservation (ex. Gbe2c). Ex. VLAN1001 is reserved for FCoE traffic in CNA/VC FlexFabric environment as far as I know. So the operation is by design – I think.

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Anyone else run into this problem? Comments or suggestions?

[phyde30]

I have seen the same issue with VLAN 1001 and was fixed by updating the NIC firmware, the issue was raised with a support call and HP level 3 told us to try updating the firmware and once completed all was fine and the VLAN issues disapeared.