Hi John,
Thanx for posting to our site.
You are experiencing this issue because the VF's are connected to a kind of small, light-weight 'switch' within the Intel(r) 82599. When the Hypervisor creates a VF and a MAC address is assigned to it (either automatically or manually) this 'switch' is notified via the driver.
With this internal switch, VF's can talk to VF's because when one VF transmits a packet and the destination MAC address matches another VF the 'switch' will automatically send it to the VF rather than out to the wire.
However VM's and bridges that are using emulated ethernet devices do not have their MAC addresses added to this 'switch'. That is the source of your issue.
I'm doing some digging - I believe there have been, or is soon to be, some updates that will allow this kind of traffic to be passed between a VF and an emulated path.
- Patrick