I’ve seen various vRops environments that report the error “virtual machine is experiencing a high number of received packet drops”. Of course this is an issue you want to investigate, because packet drops is something we don’t want to happen. Erik Scholten of VMguru wrote a quite extensive article on the issue, which I would recommend to read.
The “high number of packet drops” issue can be solved by optimizing some of the VMXNET3 parameters as Erik explains in his article. However, in is some situations (most cases I’ve seen) a false positive is reported as explained in VMware KB 2051917. A patch is published for vSphere 5.1 and 5.5, however currently there’s no solution for vSphere 6 environments.
In case we face this issue, we do have vSphere 6 and we’ve also confirmed we’re facing the false positive: what’s the next step? You can choose to (temporarily) remove the alerts in vRealize Operations through disabling the alert in the active policy. To achieve this, take the following steps:
- Open/edit the policy;
- Open Alert/Symptoms definitions;
- Search for alerts containing “packet”;
- Disable the virtual machine alarms, and optionally the host alarms contains the “high number of packet drops” message.
- Save the policy, wait about 5 minutes and the alarms will disappear.
I hope this was helpful.
