In EECS 2.0.6.0.0 guest vServers intermittently not able to communicate (ping) each other over EoIB VLAN network (Doc ID 1615444.1)

Last updated on JUNE 09, 2021

Applies to:

Purpose

Symptoms

In a fresh / upgraded EECS v2.0.6.0.0 installation of an Exalogic Rack, there is a strange problem among the guest vServers connectivity. Due to this, intermittently guest vServers cannot communicate with each other over EoIB/Ethernet interfaces.

If problematic vServers are restarted, the inter-connectivity issues can be resolved to some vServers, but occur for previously contactable vServers.

Cause

The cause of the issue, is that there are multiple gateway ports up and VNICs with the same GUID/MAC are up on multiple ports. There should only be one VNIC per switch for GUID/MAC combination.

The cause is a bug introduced in EECS v2.0.6.0.0 EMOC to enable vServers to be started on other server pools. EMOC was modified to create the VNICs for EoIB interfaces at vServer start-up. They also implemented round-robin use of connectors when VNICs are created. Unfortunately, the change did not include a check whether the VNIC already existed. When only one gateway port is up, the VNIC creation in vServer start-up silently fails because the VNIC already exists. When multiple gateway ports are up, there is a good probability that a new VNIC will be created on a different gateway port. The duplicate MACs intermittently block inter-vServer traffic on the VLAN. Everything else works.

Solution

The solution is to apply the patch from the unpublished bug:

The base bug fixes included in this patch are:

• Bug 17294107: E2E: EMOC GENERATED HOSTNAMES CONTAIN UNDERSCORE -- AN ILLEGAL CHARACTER
• Bug 17596353: el 1/2 rack with 2 pools. need to set distribution group to have all 16 nodes
• Bug 17934988: problem with eoib between vservers in exalogic 2.0.6.0.0
• Bug 18120474: eoib network issues and not able to ping vserver from another one

Details

My Oracle Support provides customers with access to over a million knowledge articles and a vibrant support community of peers and Oracle experts.