Labs

Hi all,

Running into an issue with LACP between vMX instances in a JCL (ESXi-based) lab and curious if anyone has seen this before.

I'm trying to form a simple AE bundle between two vMX routers:

• vMX2: ge-0/0/2 + ge-0/0/5 → ae0
• vMX3: ge-0/0/2 + ge-0/0/5 → ae0

Config is straightforward:

set chassis aggregated-devices ethernet device-count 1
set interfaces ge-0/0/2 gigether-options 802.3ad ae0
set interfaces ge-0/0/5 gigether-options 802.3ad ae0
set interfaces ae0 aggregated-ether-options lacp active
set interfaces ae0 unit 0 family inet address 10.100.23.x/24

Symptoms:

• Member links are up/up
• ae0 stays down
• show lacp interfaces shows:
  • Receive State: Defaulted
  • Mux State: Detached
• No LACP partner state learned on either side
• Traffic counters on member links stay at 0

However, if I remove LACP and configure plain L3 on the individual interfaces:

set interfaces ge-0/0/2 unit 0 family inet address ...

Ping works perfectly between the two routers

So:

• Data plane is working
• Connectivity is correct
• Issue appears isolated to LACP

This makes it look like LACP PDUs (ethertype 0x8809) are not being exchanged or processed correctly in the lab environment.

Questions:

• Has anyone seen LACP not forming between vMX nodes in JCL / ESXi?
• Are there known limitations with LACP control frames in this setup?
• Any required vSwitch / port group settings to allow LACP to work?

At this point it feels like a lab/hypervisor limitation rather than a Junos config issue, but wanted to sanity-check.

Cheers 

also try.... more device-count, and changing to ether-options instead of gigether-options

set chassis aggregated-devices ethernet device-count 10

set interfaces ge-0/0/2 ether-options 802.3ad ae0
set interfaces ge-0/0/5 ether-options 802.3ad ae0

------------------------------
- Aaron
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Aaron, thank you for trying to help me!  I only see TX, not RX like in your output.

jcluser@vMX2> show lacp statistics interfaces

Aggregated interface: ae0

    LACP Statistics:       LACP Rx     LACP Tx   Unknown Rx   Illegal Rx

      ge-0/0/2                   0         169            0            0

      ge-0/0/5                   0         169            0            0

jcluser@vMX3> show lacp statistics interfaces    

Aggregated interface: ae0

    LACP Statistics:       LACP Rx     LACP Tx   Unknown Rx   Illegal Rx

      ge-0/0/2                   0         236            0            0

      ge-0/0/5                   0         236            0            0

Also, this lab is on 21.1R3.11 and I cannot find "ether-options":

jcluser@vMX2# set interfaces ge-0/0/2 e?

Possible completions:

  encapsulation        Physical link-layer encapsulation

> esi                  ESI configuration of multi-homed interface

[edit]

jcluser@vMX2#

Is JCL supporting LACP nowadays?
It did not used to do that...