When I started to rebuild my lab I came across the most strangest thing when configuring my NetScaler’s again. First a little background regarding my setup:
VMware ESXi 6.5u1 Hypervisors
NetScaler VPX 1000 Platinum Appliances
Distributed vSwitches with vlan trunks enabled
Dedicated NSVLAN for management (tagged)
Data transport vlan tagged
Whilst configuring and setting op the first and secondary nodes I’ve let the default appliance imports intact, that is 2vcpu and 2gb of ram and changed the E1000 nic’s to VMXNET3 and upgraded the VM compatibility format to the latest level. Nothing wrong here and started configuring both appliances with their NSIP’s respectively. Created the HA set and all was well.
Then it was time to put in the second nic which I’m going to use for my data transport with all vlan tagged interfaces and ip’s. Gave both appliances a shutdown and configured the nic’s accordingly (so it seemed at the time it was late ?)
First node came back flawlessly but the second node wasn’t reachable anymore.. So put open the hypervisor console and I saw error messages regarding the nic and that the instance had crashed. When I would log in with the nsroot account I would get nsnet_connect prevents logon… Well ok.. that one was familiar to me with in mind the switch of E1000 and VMXNET3 devices (had this when upgrading a customer’s setup and that was the VM compatibility level, because you will need the latest build to be able to use VMXNET3, the default appliance level isn’t enough) but I’ve got both appliances up to date… I thought what the !%!@% and logged in with the nsrecover username to be able to login to the shell and dig in deeper. Thank god that worked and I was able to run the command ns_hw_err.bash which will check for any hardware error. And yes I instantly got the nic not present and reachable message. Looked at the configuration of the nic’s and a nice homer simpson moment the nic in question was still a E1000.. right… so turned it off and removed the nic, re-added it with the same MAC and presto all is well again.
Moral of the story double check your network settings when using VMXNET3!!!!