• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Using VLANs with VMware Nested ESXi

K

KapsZ28

2[H]4U
Joined
May 29, 2009
Messages
2,114
I thought I had done this in the past, but I could be mistaken. I want to be able to use VLANs in the nested environment. On my physical ESXi box, I created a standard vSwitch with several port groups. All of them have promiscuous mode enabled and different VLANs. Both the physical and nested ESXi hosts are running version 5.5. See screen shot below.



The nested environment is using a separate vCenter with three nested ESXi hosts and I am using several vDS's.



Whether promiscuous mode is enabled or not, none of the networks work if I have a VLAN configured. If I set them all to VLAN - None, then they work fine. Is there a different way to configure it so VLAN's work?

I am also wondering about using VMXNET3 on the nested ESXi hosts. I see only E1000 and E1000E are available, but I was reading virtuallyGhetto's article about VMXNET3 in a nested 5.1 environment. Although the article doesn't mention if the OS is set to "Other 64-bit" or not. Plus some other people said they were getting PSOD's when using VMXNET3. So if anyone know if this works, it would be good to know before changing everything. Mainly I just want to connect to my virtual SAN using 10 Gb. :p At the moment I am using QuantaStor. If anyone has a different recommendation for a SAN running as a VM for a lab, please let me know. It would need to be free of course.
 
Looks like you may need to configure VST (virtual switch tagging), since I'm assuming you don't have a physical switch setup to trunk the VLANs. Helpful KB's below:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003806

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/se...ype=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1010778

As far as a lab 'SAN', I would recommend using Synology. I know it's not free, but the VAAI support for iSCSI and NFS, as well as snapshot and SSD cache support make it a great candidate for the price.
 
For VST it says "The ESXi/ESX host network adapters must be connected to trunk ports on the physical switch." For my lab I am not using physical NICs or a physical switch since everything is private. Well, except for the firewall which is the only port group in the lab that is connected to a physical NIC for Internet access.

My server is connected to a Cisco switch, but being that it is a shared switch in a datacenter I am trying to avoid putting any additional VLANs on it that are only going to be used internally for a lab.

Also for a SAN, I was referring to using a virtualized SAN that also resides on the physical ESXi host. Right now I am using QuantaStor with iSCSI, but unfortunately it doesn't have VAAI support yet. At least not that I could find. Unless Synology makes virtual SANs too, I don't think that is going to work.
 
I think you just want to turn on vlan trunking for the port group which will then accept vlan tags from the guest vms in that port group. In this case your nested esxi hosts.
Unless I am misunderstanding what you are trying to do.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top