> so in your design it sounds like your VSMs live on boxes that have 1000v's VEMs.
That's correct. In my case, the VSM's are running as VMs that consume the very service they are providing. This is also true of most of my vCenters in that they are VMs that manage the environment which they are a member of. This is further complicated by a remote database (MS SQL VM) that acts as the VCDB and is a member of the same virtual datacenter. If any of these components dies, they cut the branch they are sitting on (to quote a wise man). This scenario is better known as the "chicken and egg" when things go wrong.
If you believe the marketing fluff, they will tell you that the VSMs continue to run fine with no vCenter. The truth is YMMV. Granted this has gotten leaps and bounds better over time, the fact is there may be times that you need to power up VMs and they can't get a dvPort because vCenter or it's remote DB is down. Sometimes this will be the virtualized vCenter or VCDB itself that cannot get a dvPort and thus cannot hit the network. As you can see that is a real problem.
Tip: In the above scenario, the typical approach is to steal a pNIC from the current team and create a vSS with it. Then create a port group with the desired VLAN and flip the vCenter (and/or VCDB) vNic to that vSS port group. Not sure if your vCenter is virtualized and managing itself. If so, practice this technique well.
have you ever had a problem bringing up the VSMs? how does the 1000v's survive without contact...
Right, so the communication between the VSMs (2 HA virtual appliances) and the VEM (VIB installed on ESXi host) is important. In the event that the 1000v VMs are completely offline, the VEMs continue to run as expected most of the time. However, YMMV getting dvPorts for newly powered on VMs if there are communication break-downs between any components managing the solution (i.e. vCenter, VCDB, VSM).
BTW, Cisco Bugs hit hard when they do. If available to you, you should have the Cisco AS team "bug scrub" your environment and recommend the best 1000v version. Typically the latest is the greatest but this is not always true. You should also deploy this with L3 Control instead of L2. Changing it later is way more work. Talk to your Cisco team about this.
PS - the Cisco 1000v Support is amazing. I dare you to get stuck and try them out.
