Locating Packet Loss in a mixed environment.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• Packet loss is reported on some hosts in an environment where packets are traversing the NSX components from one VMware-based environment to another.  
• Examples of traffic that may need tracked, are CIFS, SMB, NFS, RTSP, and others.
• Vms reside on non-NSX prepared hosts on either side.

Environment

• NSX
• NSX-T
• vCenter 7.0U3

 

Cause

Environmental Issue in the customer's environment

Resolution

Open a ticket with Broadcom.

Broadcom will help you use traceflow, live traffic analysis, acl counters, and packet captures to identify where the packet drops could be occurring.

General troubleshooting steps.

1. Use traceflow to trace the flow from the source to the destination through NSX. Traceflow will show if there are any rules that are causing packet drops, and where. It may also reveal routing issues.
2. ACL counters in the Edge nodes for NSX 4.x and up can be used to see if packets are getting dropped by the Edge node. Generally speaking if the exit point is an Edge uplink, and the in/out counters match, no traffic was dropped from the NSX standpoint.
3. Packet captures on the Source and destination vms, and at points in between can be used to identify what is happening in the traffic.
4. Collect all the packet captures, and screenshots of the traceflows, and output of the ACL counters and add them to your case along with logs from Managers, the edge nodes in the traffic flow, and logs from the hosts.