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milkmansson1
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vDS across two sites

Hey everyone, sorry for the nooby questions!

We have the need to deploy vDSs.  We have a couple of hosts on one site and a couple on another, with multiple 10gb ports between physical sites, including aggeregation.  We've deployed two clusters and 2x10gb nics dedicated to VM workloads.  We have some VLANs in common between the two sites (vMotion and other app subnets) and some VLANs specific to each site.   Therefore, the VLAN list trunked on each site for workload NICs is slightly different.

To assist with vMotion (and following the traditional VSS technique), I had intended two vDSs - but even two separate vDSs can't seem to have the same named Distributed Virtual Port Group.  (see attachment).

Is my solution to have one dVS across the two sites, with two separate uplink groups, both with vlan tag restrictions? (in screenshot 2).  Would this work, or is this setting for policing rather than working out if a path is local/remote?  If I have a VLAN in common between the two sites, would this still function?

Lastly (just to understand the architecture) what would happen to traffic put in a port group for whose vlan-uplink was not on that VMs' host?

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scott28tt
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T180985
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The vLAN is defined on the port group so simply adding extra uplinks as you have suggested wont help.

You could simply create 2 similar port groups then append the site name after one so they can use the correct VLAN and it would be easy to identify? Im assuming you aren't using NSX also

If a VLAN isn't trunked to a host then any VMs attempting to use a port group on that VLAN would lose connectivity

Please mark helpful or correct if my answer resolved your issue. How to post effectively on VMTN https://communities.vmware.com/people/daphnissov/blog/2018/12/05/how-to-ask-for-help-on-tech-forums
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milkmansson1
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On creating two port groups with different names:  I guess I wanted them to be the same (as was suggested in other posts).  Perhaps I'm thinking VSS's instead of VDS's, but I wanted vMotion to be seamless and fewer/no manual tasks for an inter-site vmotion event.

I think my question is around the uplinks - can I have uplinks defined such that vMWare knows that specific vlans must only be down specific uplinks?  I see the uplink has the box that defines the vlans - I don't know if thats for a filtering type purpose, or if thats actively used in decisions about which NIC to use to send outbound traffic (as would kinda be needed in this case).  Thanks!

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