How to Configure Physical Network Adapter

[dogdaynoon]

See image for more clarification:

I have a 2 port 10GB network card in a physical server. 1 of the ports is used for management and is connected to our physical network. The other port I want to set to use iSCSI to a synology storage server and access from one of the Virtual Machines in VMWare.

I expect that in order to be able to communicate with the Synology box, I would need to be able to set the IP address on that physical network adapter port. Am I going about this the wrong way?

Where are these settings as I do not find them in the Network settings in the web management interface.

[NathanosBlightc]

Hi

First question I want to ask: can you explain about your VM connectivity? all of them needs to have network access to both of management and synology?!

If the answer is Yes, So I consider the "management port" means the VMKernel interface for managing your ESXi host, then if you need to connect the VMs (or part of them) to the this network you have two options:

1. Create another port group (with same VLAN ID as the management port group if you desire to setup the VLAN) and set the IP address of each vNIC in the same subnet that needs to has access to the host management network.

2. Setup the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and connect the VMs to the same provisioned distributed port group as the VMKernel port of ESXi host is connected too.

And for the Synology storage, you need to create a Port Group, and setup the considered iSCSI Adapter (Hardware or Software, each one of you have) and also configure the port binding of ESXi pNICs (vmnics) via this link​. Then If some of your VMs need to have access to the storage, so you must setup the iSCSI initiator inside the windows guest OS and set the synology server as the iSCSI target. For both of guest and host, you should put their iSCSI adapters as the permitted initatiors in the storage setup panel

[jburen · Accepted solution]

Personally, I would use 1 nic for Management and access to your VM's. The other nic I would reserve for iSCSI traffic. The Synology can be connected to the switch and does not to be directly connected to your host.

To configure both nics you would configure two vmkernel ports. It is where you configure IP address and other networking configuration info like gateway and subnetmask.

Setup two virtual switches in your host. On the first create a port group for your VMs and connect the first vmkernel port (Management). Create a second virtual switch for iSCSI with a second vmkernel port and connect it to the second nic. You would also add the software iSCSI adapter in the Storage Adapters section.

But remember! With this setup you won't have any nic redundancy.

[dogdaynoon]

Thanks for your responses. Management interface is working as expected and I am unconcerned with it at this time.

If I am understanding correctly, in order to get the virtual machine to see the Synology NAS, I would need to do the following steps in the order stated.

First: Set the Synology's NIC's connection port to say: 10.10.1.5 | 255.255.0.0 and set up the target and LUN to use that port.

NOTE: The NIC on the Host for VMWare is a 2 x port - 10Gb switch.

Next, in the ESXI web interface on the host I would need to do these things in this order.

1.) Set up a virtual switch using the required port on the physical NIC. (port 2 as port 1 is the management interface) Call this vSynology

2.) Set up a Port Group targeting the virtual switch vSynology. Call this Synology

3.) Create a VMkernal NIC wher I can set the to use the Synology port group and set MTU and static IP 10.10.1.6 | 255.255.0.0. Call this vmk1

4.) Under Storage -> Adapters create a new iSCSI Software and point to the IP of synology port. 10.10.1.5

Through all of these steps, I was able to finally get the VMWare ESXI to see the Targets. However, the Virtual Machine (Windows Server 2019) doesn't not connect to iscsi targets and no new devices show up under the Storage Devices tab. What needs done in Windows Server VM to be able to see the Synology? Should I just add a virtual switch to Windows Server and IP it accordingly then use iSCSI manager in Windows Server to connect?

Thanks for responses so far.

[dogdaynoon]

Well, I think I have it figured out.

As I better understand now, the Storage iSCSI adapter is used to create storage pools that VMs can connect to. (like drives) My original disconnect was that the VM would somehow set up another iSCSI connection to the storage adapter as opposed to just seeing the extra space.

My problem has been that synology storage container already has data on it. I don't want to wipe that. Another problem I have found is that the Synology will not let multiple connections happen at once to the same target, I have a connection on that one already. I will need to do some work on the synology and my current network structure to allow for the new connections.

Thanks for your comments,

They helped a lot.

James

[jburen]

You're correct. With this setup you connect the ESXi host to the NAS. Then you can create a datastore on which you can place the VMDK files of the VM.

Or you can create a LUN on the NAS, present that to the ESXi host and use that LUN as a RDM (Raw Device Mapping).

And finally you can create a LUN and use an in-guest iSCSI connection from within the guest OS.

But imho the first option is preferred.