IvS PRP pseudo uplink status and configuration check

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

Industrial vSwitch (IvS) supports Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) for redundancy in Profinet industrial ethernet. IvS can have two connections for LAN A and LAN B, and it sends the same PRP packets for both LAN A and LAN B for redundancy. This KB article describe how to check the status and configuration of the PRP pseudo uplink.

Environment

4.2.x

Resolution

PRP uses Pseudo uplink (vmnic128) to handle PRP frames to/from both LAN A and LAN B. The status of the pseudo Uplink can be checked by running the following command on the ESXi host.

[root@prmb-aaaa-h0802:~] esxcfg-nics -lS
Name PCI Driver Link Speed Duplex MAC Address MTU Description
vmnic128 Pseudo phydrv Up 25000Mbps Full <MAC Address #1> 9000 VMware Pseudo PRP device

PRP has two connections for both LAN A and LAN B for redundancy. And each LAN has two uplinks for teaming with active-stanby option. 
The PRP configurations can be found in the output of the following command to check the LAN A and LAN B status. This output shows vmnic info associated with LAN A/B uplinks. You need to specify a Switch ID (ex. “0”). 

[root@localhost:~] nsxcli -c get ens prp config 0
Fri Feb 21 2025 UTC 14:00:03.715
PRP Config for switch 0
 PRP uplink(channel) vmnic128

 LanA uplink1 vmnic2
 LanA uplink2 vmnic4
 LanA policy Active_Standby
 LanA status UP

 LanB uplink1 vmnic3
 LanB uplink2 vmnic5
 LanB policy Active_Standby
 LanB status UP

Red Box MAC <MAC Address of Red Box>
Default Supervision Multicast <Muticast MAC address for PRP supervision frames>