Enabling vSphere Network Health Check

Networking configuration of a vSphere environment is challenging, right ?!

May be due the fact the majority of companies has different teams for managing the physical network and the vSphere environment, resulting with you having just half of the information.

As you might know, the physical network port on the switch must match the configurations of the vSphere Virtual Switch, VLAN tags, MTU, teaming etc…. add to the complexity, several hosts, each one having a few NICs and connections, is not unusual that eventually you will get a non working network port.

Troubleshooting this misconfigurations is hard…. well, not anymore !!!!

vSphere 5.1 introduced a new feature, Network Health Check.

When enabled it can monitor and check the following configuration.

VLAN – check all VLAN IDs of the portgroups created on the VDS against the trunk configuration on the physical network switch. 
MTU – check if the network switch can send/receive packets with the size, MTU, configured on the VDS. 
Teaming – check if the configuration is set for IP Hash, which is the required configuration when using LLDP(teaming).

Be aware that this check is just againts the port on which the host's NICs is connected to. It does not check all the way through other switches connection.

If you are not familiar with vSphere WebClient Server, this task can be tricky.

That’s it; Network Health Check can ONLY be enabled through vSphere Web Client. Get used with that, all new features will just be avaible through it.

So, lets go check how….

- Login on vSphere WebClient and click Networking

- Select the VDS that you want to enable the Network Health Check.

- Select Manage, Settings, Health Check and then click on Edit…

 

- enable the desired feature to check

To monitor the Network health check status.

- Select the VDS

- Click on the Monitor tab and then Health

Now you can monitor if some of the configuration does not match on each individual host and uplink.

Making our life easier, right ; )