After two days of troubleshooting, I have figured out why my ESXi NIC teaming is failing.
I have the following network topology (simplified):
vmnic0 is currently set to unused on the ESXi virtual switch. Packet dumps (from the host) show NO outgoing packets on this physical interface.
However, my network connectivity to this host on SW1 is routinely knocked out (every several seconds). I found that the VMKernel MAC address b026.28b5.3b8c keeps appearing on SW1 port Gi1/0/7, which knocks it off of port Gi1/0/22 and causes packets to go towards the inactive ESXi interface. Incidentally, it is known behavior that VMWare grabs the physical MAC address of the NIC and uses it for the first VMKernel network on the first vSwitch.
After setting up a mirroring port on SW1, I found that vmnic0 is sending periodic LLDP packets from the same MAC address. In addition, VMWare tells me LLDP isn't even supported on standard vSwitches.
The fact those packets are not seen by the HOST OS, tells me this is a hardware level issue. It's worth mentioning that vmnic2 does not exhibit that behavior and it is a different type of NIC card.
vmnic0 is listed as a Broadcom BCM57416 NetXtreme-E 10GBASE-T RDMA Ethernet Controller in VMWare. This is on a Dell Poweredge R740.
How do I disable the hardware level LLDP agent on this NIC?
And, what issues might this cause if I do so?
