Heads Up! VSA Physical Switch Connectivity Check

I’ve been working with my colleague, Rawlinson Rivera, on documenting a few features around VSA deployments. Rawlinson is currently working on a new feature of VSA 5.1 called brownfield install, which basically allows you to deploy the VSA when you already have VMs running on your ESXi hosts.

During the host audit section of the install, we observed the following warning:- NIC ports to physical switch connectivity doesn’t provide both NIC and physical switch redundancy.

VSA installation warning around physical switch redundancyThis is not something I had observed in previous versions of the VSA (and we were using the same environment). It would seem that this is a new check implemented in VSA 5.1 with vSphere 5.1. The thing to note is that this is just a warning – and its a good warning to have as well, as a single switch failure could impact your whole shared storage environment. Since it is a warning, you can choose to ignore it. It might be that in SMB (Small to Midsize businesses) or ROBO (Remote Office, Branch Office) situations, a second physical network switch is not available or indeed affordable.

The issue is however is that if you have a stackable switch configuration, you will also get this warning. So even though you might have physical switch redundancy in your network, you could still encounter this warning. In that case, it is safe to just ignore the warning and continue with the installation/deployment.

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