Guest on VMware ESXi interacting with VMware ESXi via "in-band" interface

[morphyno]

Hi Everyone!

I am expanding our KVM solution onto VMware to address our VMware's customer's needs. In KVM, we used a static in-band private network with pre-defined static IP address' so our applications can interact with the hyper-visor. This allowed our application to adapt resources automatically based on load without having customers to reallocate resources manually.

I wish to establish the same setup on VMware. My goal is to have a working setup on VMware 5.5 and then VMware 6.0. However, I have not a found a way to create a private network on VMware with a virual interface for ESX. It seems ESX requires a physical interface to be present for every virtual network in order for ESX to participate. In other words, there is a limit of management network. Is there an alternative method to this? I will be running pyvmomi on the guest, but the first step is have an established static IP address for ESX.

I'm curious if anyone else has come across this issue.

Much Thanks

Morgan

[thinkcloudmento]

Morgon,

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=10108...

Check the VMCI concept... This is the closest I can think to accomplish this...

Regards

Ram

[morphyno]

Thanks, this is indeed interesting. After browsing through the API, it doesn't seem to be a VMCI listener/server running on ESXi side. ESXi enables the VMCI to enable faster direct interaction between VM in forms of sockets or shared memory. So I can use it between guests, but not to talk the hyper-visor directly.

I don't understand why VMWare won't allow a true private network involving the hyper-visor  . KVM so much more flexible (with the power of Linux and Linux networkstack)

[chr1s86]

Hi Morgan,

what is the reason for your applications to interact with the hypervisor?

Regards,

Chris

[morphyno]

Hi Chris:

This is because we are porting a KVM solution to VMware. In our KVM solution, our client can connect to the hyper-visor via a dedicated static network so it can then re-lay that information to a higher level controller application in cloud (where it won't have direct connection to the hyper-visor). This allows our guest to serve as a relay agent between our orchestration layer and the hyper-visor itself.

Much Thanks

Morgan

[chr1s86]

as you can see here, Maximum traffic for a vmxnet3 your VM to VM traffic can do more than 20Gb without any tunig option.

When you have a latancy critical application that is reachable from outside you can followup here Tuning ESXi Host Networking Configuration or the Perf Best Practices Guide https://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.5.pdf

But i still cannot imagine a single reason that a application should interact with the hypervisor.