vSphere Distributed Switch teaming matched status alarm triggered in vCenter Server

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
When ESXi hosts are connected to a vSphere Distributed Switch and the Network Health Check is enabled, you experience these symptoms:

• The Events view in the vCenter Server Tasks & Events tab reports constant alarms similar to:
  
  Alarm 'vSphere Distributed Switch teaming matched status' on x.x.x.x changed from Green to Red
   
• In the /var/log/hostd.log file of the ESXi host, you see this entries similar to:
  
  Teaming configuration in the vSphere Distributed Switch on host hostname does not match the physical switch configuration in ha-datacenter. Detail: No loadbalance_ip teaming policy matches.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Cause

This issue occurs when the Network Health Check feature detects a teaming parameter misconfiguration due to one of these scenarios:

• The IP Hash teaming policy is configured for the vSphere Distributed Switch but the uplink ports are not configured in a port-channel setting.
• The uplink ports are configured in a port-channel setting but the IP Hash teaming policy is not set for the vSphere Distributed Switch.
• SR-IOV is configured on an ESXi host

Resolution

To resolve this issue, ensure that:

• The physical switch ports are configured to use EtherChannel or Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). For more information, see Sample configuration of EtherChannel / Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) with ESXi/ESX and Cisco/HP switches (1004048).
• The vSphere Distributed Switch NIC teaming is using the IP Hash load balance policy. For more information, see NIC teaming in ESXi and ESX (1004088).
• SR-IOV is not in use on any of the ESXi Uplinks configured for the DVS, SR-IOV is not compatible with the DVS Teaming health check due to beacon filtering that occurs with SR-IOV ports

Additional Information

Depending on the options that you select, vSphere Distributed Switch Health Check can generate a significant number of MAC addresses for testing teaming policy, MTU size, VLAN configuration, resulting in extra network traffic. For more information, see Network health check feature limitations in vSphere (2034795).

After you disable the vSphere Distributed Switch Health Check, the generated MAC addresses age out of your physical network environment according to your network policy. For more information, see the Enable or Disable vSphere Distributed Switch Health Check section of the vSphere Networking Guide,

Also, see Enabling vSphere Distributed Switch health check in the vSphere Web Client.