On two recent Supermicro servers, typing reboot actually shuts down the server. Thanks to Google and this blogpost, http://major.io/2013/06/03/supermicro-x9scix9sca-server-does-a-shutdown-rather-than-a-reboot/ I no longer have this issue. Short story: just blacklist the module named “mei” and you’re good.
So, like me, you want to have redundancy for your virtual machine network. For my lab setup, I use a refurbished Cisco router 3825 with two gigabit interfaces, two Procurve 2810-24G and a small server with 4 gigabit interfaces for the ESXi. You just have to: team the NICs on the ESXi (use src-mac + beacon probing), use port-channel on the Cisco router and src-mac too, configure the switches exactly the same way as if there wasn’t any redundancy, add a link between the two switches and configure it to transmit the VLANs you need, don’t forget to add STP on the switches and put a high priority (low number) on the link between the switches. So you should end up with the following setup: ...