LEAF Switches cannot form LLDP neighborship to Virtual APIC VM

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0
• VMware vSphere ESX 7.x
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

• Cisco leaf switches do not receive LLDP frames from a Virtual APIC VM hosted on ESXi host
• The Virtual APIC VM receives LLDP frames from LEAF switch
• Virtual Distributed Switch is not configured with LLDP
• NetMisc_DropBPDUPackets filter displays increment of 1 unit every 30s matching LLDP frames timer.

Environment

ESXi 8.x
VCF 9.0

Cause

LLDP frames sent from APIC VM to upstream switch are being filtered by the BPDU filter (NetMisc_DropBPDUPackets).

Resolution

• Disable Net.BlockGuestBPDU as per BPDU Filter feature in vSphere: 
  
  1. Using the vSphere Client, switch to the Hosts and Clusters view.
  2. Click the desired host from the inventory tree view in the left pane.
  3. Click the Configuration Tab and then Advanced Settings under Software.
  4. Click Net and then locate the Net.BlockGuestBPDU option.
  5. Change the value to 0, which disables BPDU filtering.
  6. Click OK.

Note: By disabling BPDU filtering you are allowing all the VM's vNIC's on the ESXi host to send not only LLDP but also other BPDU's 

Additional Information

Understanding the BPDU Filter feature in vSphere

Troubleshooting Denial of Service attack in virtual infrastructure cluster

Configuring advanced options for ESXi

Deploying a virtual APIC Using VMware vCenter