CAS-VA intermittently dropped network connections.

Products

• CAS-VA

Issue/Introduction

Network connection to the CAS-VA intermittently drops.

This applies only to CAS running as virtual appliance on ESX server.

Cause

This is based on the continuous ping test done to the CAS-VA IP where when it failed, the ping gets a timeout.

The packet capture shows that the ping request did arrived on the CAS-VA.

The CAS-VA was returning two MAC addresses that belongs to the CAS-IP after other devices was doing an ARP probe and this seems to happen when it failed to respond the ping that came from the test machine.

In this example, 10.10.10.10 is the CAS-VA IP.

 

On the CAS-VA configuration, only one interface been configured with an IP which is interface 0:0 that belongs to "Network adapter 1" and the second interface (1:0) is not been configured with any IP.

On the ESX server or the VMWare console, the two MAC addresses that were responding to the ARP probe for the CAS-VA IP 10.10.10.10 actually belongs to the CAS-VA itself based on the screen shot below.

 

It seems the intermittent network issue is due to the duplicate ARP respond that the CAS-VA IP was getting.

Resolution

Disable one of the network adapter from the VMWare side resolved the issue where in this case, disabling the "Network adapter 2" which does not have any IP configured on the CAS-VA.

This issue is more on the ESX server or VMWare side.