Ethernet NIC order during discovery

[jlangmead]

Hi

I'm building a two node cluster and noticed the Eth NIC order is different between the two nodes - what causes this?

The first node as this order - which is what I would expect:

The second node has this order - notice how Eth3 is one of the 10Gbe ports on this node and the last of the 1Gbe ports is now Eth 4.

The issue is that VMware will name these from vmnic0 to vmnic5 in the order they appear (lowest PCI bus etc) so once deployed these  will have inconsistent vmnic names which, although technically not a problem, isn't as straight forward to manage if you want the same physical NICs to have the same VMware vmnic identifyers across both nodes in the cluster.

What do I need to do to ensure that the NICs are consistent as the 1Gbe ports should always be Eth0 through to Eth3 shouldn't they with the 10Gbe ports as Eth 4 & 5?

Thanks in advance

[fahlis]

Hi @jlangmead 
I have also experienced this several times.

I just trusted it by MAC address and counted eth4 as eth3, the deployment guide worked with that.

I hav also seen that after a reboot it has set it correct again.
This must be a bug.

What does HPE have to say ?

Br / Tony

[jlangmead]

Thanks Tony

Yeah - Do you run VMware? I was going to go with that but then in vCenter the 1Gbe NICs are then vmnic0, 1, 2 & 4 with the 10Gbe NICs as vmnic3 & 5.

This then means that vSwitch0 has a different vmnic's 0, 1, 2 & 3 for node 1 and vmnic's 0, 1, 2 & 4 node 2 and vSwitch1 is equally as different for the 10Gbe NICs. It's just messy - I know you can get down and dirty in VMware to change the vmnic assignments but that shouldn't be necessary.

I'm a bit OCD perhaps but I've never has issues with normal DL380's in this way.

Hopefully HPE will be along soon - despite all my moaning this is a great forum and the HPE guys are superb.

[fahlis]

@jlangmead 

yes only Vmware this far with SimpliVity

Indeed it's messy.

Actually we always sell the nodes with an additional 2-port 10Gbe NIC Card. So we never use the 1Gbe NICs.

And I agree, great forum and the HPE guys are superb

Br / Tony

[JohnHHaines · Accepted solution]

The enumeration of the NICs by the deployment image is somewhat random due to how lInux manages the PCIe bus. However, you should find it consistent for the Deployment manager and VMware.

If you plug in only one 10 Gb nic during the deployment, it's much easier to sort out. 

[jlangmead]

Thanks very much - you're right

This turned out to be a bit of a non-event.

Depsite the initial image showing the Ethernet assignment as not being consistent between nodes and somehwat 'random' as you say, once VMware was deployed and the networking viewed within vCenter all the vmnicN names assigned to the devices are accurate and as expected.

So this observation can be safely ignored - or (as suggested) just plug in a single 1Gbe and 10Gbe to avoid any confusion.

thanks again