PRP VDAN node MAC addresss shows 00:00:00:00:00:00 on IvS

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

Industrial vSwitch (IvS) can provide network redundancy for industrial ethernet called Profinet by using Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP). PRP node list command can show the list of the MAC address of PRP Dual Attached Node (DAN), Redundancy Box (RedBox) and Virtual DAN (VDAN). However, VDAN MAC address shows zero MAC address (00:00:00:00:00:00) in the table.

 

Environment

4.2.x

 

Resolution

If you see that VDAN MAC address is 00:00:00:00:00:00 in the table, this means no PRP supervision frame has been received on the node. You need to verify that network connectivity between VDAN and DAN.

To verify that PRP node list shows the VDAN MAC address is 00:00:00:00:00:00, follow the steps below
 - 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 node <swID>

There are many reasons that cause network connectivity issue. However, you should verify if VLAN ID is set correctly as a first step. If the VLAN ID is not set, the node list output shows "-" in the vlanID field. You need to look into the VLAN configurations in the network including switches.

PRP supervision frame uses multicast MAC address and it is configurable. You need to verify it is configured correctly in NSX UI and Redbox. 

Also, you can capture the frames on uplinks to analyze what is happening. If you want to check the traffic from a DAN to a Virtual DAN (VDAN), you can follow the steps below.

- Run the command and find the LAN A uplink and LAN B uplink for the vPLC. Uplink information can be found in the fields of lanAUplink and lanBUplink.
 nsxcli -c get ens prp vdan list <swID>
- If you run the pktcap-uw for the vmnic with the filter to limit the frames from the DAN node MAC address, you can see the Profinet frames received from LAN A. Profinet EtherType is 0x8892.
 pktcap-uw --uplink <vmnic> --capture UplinkRcvKernel --srcmac <DAN node MAC Address> -o - | tcpdump-uw -vvv -en -r -