Virtual ESXi in WorkStation and Physical Trunk Ports

[cjones108]

Hello,

I am setting up a lab at home. I have install a virtual ESXi 6.7 host in WOrkStation 15.5 on windows 10. In my physical machine I have a nic card with four ports in it. I have attached two of these to Workstation and then the virtual ESXi server. The ESXi server is not managed by vSphere. These Physical NIC are then attached to two ports on a Cisco 3750 with the below config for each port

Switchport Trunk Encapsulation dot1q

Switchport Mode Trunk

Switchport Trunk Allowed Vlan 1,10,20,30,40

Spanning-Tree Portfast Trunk

Interface VLan1

     IP Address 10.0.1.5 255.255.255.0

I have created two VSwitches (vSwitch1 and vSwitch2), one for each physical NICs and assigned a prot group to each of them for VLAN 1. My problem comes when trying to get VMs to comunicate to each through the physical switch that is attached.

A Windows 2016 server (10.0.1.10) in attached to vSwitch1 - Physical NIC1, and a Client Windows 10 (10.0.1.20), vSwitch2 Physical Nic2, have been installed. If both devices are on the same vSwitch them can communicate. The siwtch show mac address-table command shows the MAC addresses of the VMs, and a show IP arp show the correct layer 3 addresses with the correct VLAN ID.

I have no idea why these cant talk to each other, unless it is something to do with have a virtual ESXi server. Any help will be greatly apreciated.

Just to add to this i would let t set it up in this way as I want to install a virtual wireless lan controller and need to use vsitches to trunk the ports, without paying for an actual ESXi server.

Kind regards,

Chris

[Alex_Romeo · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You were good at installing the test environment. I did it too, however, you can't expect the same result as a physical Esxi server. Unfortunately Esxi is virtual and who controls in this case is the vmware workstation that is at the base. It can be a good lab to see how features are configured, but it will never be like a physical Esxi.

ARomeo