FreeBSD + carp on VMWare ESX

[Chris Anders]

Hi All,

 

I appear to be suffering the same problem as many others on the internet with carp and vmware vsphere (ESX4) when running with redundant nics in the default failover mode which connect to two separate switches.

 

I have found this old thread - http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-net@freebsd.org/msg30562.html which talks about the exact same issue with a patch submitted to the list from Matthew Grooms which can be found here - http://www.shrew.net/static/patches/esx-carp.diff

 

After applying the patch, recompiling and setting net.inet.carp.drop_echoed=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf my problem was solved!

 

Is there any way that this patch could be applied upstream as this vsphere setup is rather common where Cross-Stack EtherChannel cannot be deployed which is the known work around for this issue.

 

I also tried the patch submitted by Ermal Luçi which didn't work...

 

I did all my testing with freebsd8-current