A large part of writing the VCP5 Study Guide was creating many exercises around the exam objectives. One of the items covered in exam objective 2.1 is to Add/Configure/Remove vmnics on a vNetwork Standard Switch. I thought it would be interesting to detail the steps I used to test this exercise.
This entire lab setup was running in VMware Workstation. For this exercise, there is a single ESXi 5 host and the vMA 5 is also used. The ESXi host has vSwitch0 for management traffic only and the VM Network port group has been removed from it. A vSwitch1 was built with a single NIC (vmnic1) and a single port group for virtual machine traffic. On this ESXi host are two VMs each with 256MB, 1 vCPU, and an e1000 NIC that boot to a Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD and connect to the virtual machine port group on vSwitch1.
I first started by powering up each VM and waiting for Ubuntu to boot. I then set up continuous pings to the ESXi host's management address from the VMs running Ubuntu. I issued the resxtop command on the vMA and pressed the N key to view the network information. Here is what I saw.
As expected, both VMs (VM2 and VM3) are using vmnic1.
The next step was to add a second NIC (vmnic2) to vSwitch1. I did this using the vSphere Client. Here is what I saw in the vMA.
Notice that VM2 is now using vmnic2. The Linux continuous ping ran uninterrupted throughout this process.
The final step was to remove a NIC (vmnic1) from vSwitch1. I did this using the vSphere Client. Here is what I saw in the vMA.
Notice that both VMs are now using vmnic2. And again, the continuous ping did not stop running!
Adding and removing vmnics from a vSwitch is a nondisruptive process, and the testing detailed above proves this.
As always, thanks for reading!
Brian
