Dual / Quad NIC passthrough

[Martian]

Hey all, just wondering if it is possible to pass each port of dual / quad NIC's (PCI-e) to different VM's in ESXi 5 or if I have to pass all ports to the same VM?

Thanks in advance

 

[CEpeep]

If you are doing Hardware Passthrough (VT-d/IOMMU) then you can pass only the physical card as a single entity to a VM. If you are talking about virtual network adapters, you can easily assign each port of a physical NIC to different VMs.

 

[Martian]

Thanks for the reply CEpeep. Not the answer I was hoping for but much better to find out before I spend money.

 

[CEpeep]

What would you need such a capability for? Virtual NICs work great for assigning individual ports to discreet VMs. Passthrough of NICs is generally reserved for router VMs, in my experience. Even in those cases it is primarily to ease management, not to add features.

 

[Child of Wonder]

I don't get it either. The purpose of virtualization is to abstract the hardware so you don't have to dedicate it to VMs and they can instead share the resources.

Even in the case of a router there's no need to dedicate ports. Simple VLANing will accomplish the same thing, which is how I have my virtual RRAS server configured. The VM's "WAN" vNIC is on VLAN 10 which only goes to the port my cable modem is connected to and the "LAN" vNIC is on VLAN 1, my general home network VLAN.

OP, yes you can dedicate ports to individual VMs by creating multiple vSwitches, each with 1 vmnic assigned to them. Inside those vSwitches create just one port group and assign only 1 VM to that port group. Now that single VM is the only one using that physical port.

 

[Sjakie]

I could see a use with quad nics to assign 2 interfaces to a router VM and use the rest for iscsi traffic or whatnot. It would save pci-e lanes which could become few in small builds with HBAs, nics and whatever.

 

[Martian]

My original plan was to pass two port of a quad port to PFsense and the other two ports to Mythtv (to keep the traffic from my HDhomeruns off my main network). I only have one 4x PCI-e slot left in my system. Obviously the original plan isn't going to work and probably isn't the best idea anyway (which I why I post here - you guys have been doing this a lot longer than I have)

Is there any downside to using vlans instead of passing the NICs through for a router? I'm guessing I could connect each vlan in ESXi to a vlan on my switch and connect PFsense to each vlan to handle the routing. would this work? End goal is to separate WAN, LAN, MythTV, and possibly Guest.

 

[Child of Wonder]

You can easily do that with VLANs and the only downside is that there's no physical separation of the traffic since it's all hitting the same switch. But I doubt your home lab needs to be PCI DSS compliant or gets audited so you'll be fine.

 

[jonnyjl]

You can easily do that with VLANs and the only downside is that there's no physical separation of the traffic since it's all hitting the same switch. But I doubt your home lab needs to be PCI DSS compliant or gets audited so you'll be fine.

Lol

Though the PCI DSS compliant comment would be funnier if it wasn't so true... Sigh.

 

[Child of Wonder]

Lol

Though the PCI DSS compliant comment would be funnier if it wasn't so true... Sigh.

I've worked for a company that had to be PCI DSS compliant.

The security was so tight that one day I wanted to burn a Windows ISO. When I attempted to do so, one of the security guys about 4 cubes away popped his head up and went "what are you doing?!" like I had just cut the red wire instead of the blue and we're all dead.

 

[danswartz]

Yeah, a friend of mine works at a company like that. They can hardly blow their noses...

 

[lopoetve]

I could see a use with quad nics to assign 2 interfaces to a router VM and use the rest for iscsi traffic or whatnot. It would save pci-e lanes which could become few in small builds with HBAs, nics and whatever.

You're so way overthinking it...