Determining the mac address for PRP supervision frames on IvS

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

Industry vSwitch (IvS) supports Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) that can be used with industrial ethernet called Profinet. In addition to data frames, PRP uses supervision frames to check health status. Each PRP Dual Attached Node (DAN) sends the PRP supervsion frames periodically with Multicast MAC address for destination.

The Multicast MAC address is configurable, so during troubleshooting it could be required to identify the Multicast MAC address used for the specific PRP supervision frames.

 

Environment

4.2.x

Resolution

The default multicast MAC address for the PRP supervision MAC address is configurable on NSX manager UI. You can check it using the following steps:
 - On NSX manager UI, go to System/Fabric/Hosts/Transport Node Profile and open the transport node profile
 - Then click Host Switch and select select the target VDS
 - The multicast MAC address is configured in field “Supervision Multicast Address”.

You can verify that the default multicast MAC address configuration is set in VDS on ESXi host correctly:
 - Get the MAC address of the NIC that is connected Profinet network
 - Login to the ESXi Host via SSH
 - Run the command and find the DvsPortset name for the MAC address

 net-stats -l

 - Run the command and find Switch ID (swID) for the DvsPortset

 nsxcli -c get ens switch list

 - Run the command and find the entry for the MAC address in the node table output

 nsxcli -c get ens prp config <swID>

 - Check the Default Supervision Multicast value in the command output

Actual multicast MAC address can be found in the output of ens prp vdan list. Virtual DAN (VDAN) is a PRP node that doesn't have a capabilty of PRP, but PRP Redbox provides connectivities to both LAN A and LAN B as a proxy.
In the use case of IvS, VMs on ESXi act as VDAN and IvS VDS is the PRP Redbox. The multicast MAC address for PRP supervision can be found in the VDAN list:
 - Run the command and find the entry for the MAC address in the node table output

 nsxcli -c get ens prp config <swID>

 - Check the SupMcastMAC field in the command output