ESXi Virtual Switch not passing VLAN tagged traffic

[tvick]

I have a an ESXi machine that is currently running standalone (not connected to vCenter) and I'm having trouble getting a virtual switch to pass VLAN tagged traffic. I've attached screenshots of the config.

The machine management traffic is on VLAN 121 and this traffic passes just fine. I cannot get the VM traffic to pass on VLANs 151 or 500. The switch is setup correctly (I'm 99% sure) with trunk ports. I believe there is a configuration issue in ESXi but I cannot figure out what it is.

The machine also has a distributed switch configured but I am unable to attach any VM NICs to these distributed switch port groups without getting this error: "Addition or reconfiguration of network adapters attached to non-ephemeral distributed virtual port groups (NET-TR-VBR01-LAN1) is not supported." I'm assuming this is because it is currently disconnected from the vCenter server, correct?

Any help or guidance on this is greatly appreciated. It has to be something so simple that I'm just overlooking.

[diegodco31]

Hi

To use vds you need vcenter.

Can you ping the gateway of these networks?

[tvick]

I have several VMs that are attached to the VDS and those work fine. The network traffic is passing and the VMs can talk to each other and the gateway. For some reason, when this host lost power and came back, some of the VMs that that had NICs attached to the VDS became disconnected and I could not reconnect them to the VDS in the ESXi UI. So, I created a regular virtual switch to connect them but this switch will not pass traffic. Unfortunately one of the VMs connected to the new virtual switch is my router to reconnect to vCenter. So I'm kind of in a chicken before the egg situation where I cannot reconnect the router to the VDS but without that I cannot get the VDS to work correctly.

I just don't understand why the new virtual switch is not working. I've had this setup before and it worked fine but I don't know what I'm missing this time.

[diegodco31]

Hi.

You need to migrate the switch vds to standard switch, nics are associated with vds.

See:

VMware Knowledge Base

vmware migrate distributed switch to standard switch - YouTube

[tvick]

The VDS and the virtual switch are associated with different physical NICs on the server. I just added a port group to the existing virtual switch I was already using for the management network and added the VLANs to the switchport.

vmnic0 is attached as an uplink to vSwitch0 which originally just contained the management network on VLAN 121.

vmnic1 is attached as an uplink to the VDS which I've left untouched and the VMs attached to this VDS are working fine.

I can't figure out why the port groups I added (VLAN 151 and VLAN 500) to vSwitch 0 are not passing traffic.