Beacon probing walk through

Beacon probing walk through

Beacon probing is a mechanism which is used for network failover detection. By sending and receiving beacon probe packets on all physical NICs in the team and uses this packet information along with link state to determine link failure.

It can detects failures, such as cable disconnects and physical switch power failures on the physical network.

The design of Beacon probing works with physical Switch redundant networking to determine downstream link failures beyond the ESXi host networking.

When there is failed uplink observed in one of the uplink of switch than the switch start sending their frames over the other active uplinks. This is standard network fault tolerance from vSphere.

 But what will happen in the second scenario when there this link failure with Physical Switch and the Core Switch?

Yes normal situation uplink will still show as active and route frames to the Physical Switch. In this case ESXi server is unaware of the link failure.

But if Link-State Tracking is configured it will put all the downstream ports into and error state and with this ESXi can determine that there is error and will utilize other uplink port.

In beacon technic Host will continuously send out a broadcast packet vSphere and will forward it to all the physical switch.

·        VMware recommends having 3 or more physical NICs in the team.

·        VMware does not recommend multiple physical NIC connections to the same physical Switch. This can cause Beacon probing to fail to detect issues beyond the switch.

  

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