vSphere Provisioning stack's network traffic isolation between 'defaultTcpipStack' and 'vSphereProvisioning' net stack is violated

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When performing cold migrations and cloning provisioning operations, the netstack is not correctly being used as intended with the feature.
• During migrations, the only time provisioning netstack are used is when the destination and source hosts do not have access to the same storage. (For example: Local storage to Local storage).

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Cause

This issue occurs because the provisioning stack is not being used as intended.

Note: As stated, this is being violated.

"By using the provisioning TCP/IP stack, you can isolate the traffic from the cloning operations on a separate gateway. After you configure a VMkernel adapter with the provisioning TCP/IP stack, all adapters on the default TCP/IP stack are disabled for the Provisioning traffic."

For more information, see the VMKernel Networking Layer section of the vSphere Networking Guide.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting VMware ESXi 6.0.x, 6.5.x, and 7.0.x.

For these versions, there is no resolution or workaround until upgrading to 8.0+.  We introduced a new protocol called Unified Data Transport (UDT) in vSphere 8. In a nutshell, UDT combines the best of the NFC and vSphere vMotion protocols. For more information, see vSphere vMotion Unified Data Transport.