vSAN and HP 5400 switches

While setting up vSAN we found several guides for Cisco switches, but none for HP. Even the HP vSAN reference architecture was using Cisco Nexus switches.

We did initially see the error message: "Host cannot communicate with all other nodes in the VSAN enabled cluster" even though all vSAN enabled vmkernel interfaces could ping each other. vSAN has some special multicast requirements that needs to be taken care of.

We were trying to get HP 5400 series 10GbE switches to work with vSAN.

After playing around for a bit with the switch config we came up with the following working config:

vlan 53

   name "vSAN network 1"

   tagged C1-C8

   ip address 172.16.53.1 255.255.255.0

   ip igmp

   jumbo

   exit

Within a few minutes the error messages were gone, status went to Normal with a green icon and vSAN started working nicely.

Since we had 2x 10GbE nics dedicated to vSAN we also setup a secondary vlan for vSAN and bound each of the vlans to different nics in order to get maximum performance.