VMotion and “Isolation Addresses”
Recently I setup a VMWare infrastructure at work, and when I finally thought I had everything right, I began getting errors about systems not being able to contact the “Isolation Address”. Naturally, I said “LOLWTFLOL” as I Googled for my error message.
It turns out that in order to enable VMotion, every system on the network has to be able to ping the aforementioned isolation address, which defaults to .1 of their subnet. Well, I’ll be. If somebody had mentioned this to me, I wouldn’t be in such a pickle! Since I was setting this up in a management vlan like a good admin, I didn’t have a .1!
After nearly 2 hours of being on hold (no, I’m not joking…), I got a tech to let me in on a little tip! He told me to go to my options, and in advanced settings, I could set das.isolationaddress to whatever I wanted! Wooo!
Oh, wait. VMotion also requires that every host can resolve every other host using an FQDN, and therefore DNS. Kindof quirky to me, as that seems to almost necessitate a secondary DNS server, and you’re not even out of your management vlan yet.
Tags: isolation address, servers, stupidity, vmotion, vmware
