Networking between ESX and Workstation

[ZosConsultingSe]

I’m not sure what category this falls under so please forgive me if this is the wrong forum.

I have a lab with three DELL power edge servers, a DELL Dimension PC and my laptop.  It also has two networks, one I’ll call the ‘primary internet’ connection (192.168.1.0) and is used by all the devices here, both wirelessly (protected) and wired, the other, ‘private intranet’ or (192.168.2.0), is used only by the computers in the lab as an interconnect.  The first one goes through a wireless hub with DHCP and remote management and works well for all devices connected to it, however the private intranet has a simple switch.

The Dell PowerEdge servers run ESXi with eth0 on the primary internet (incl. the management network) and eth1 on the private intranet, so there are two vswitches to which each VM connect.  The Dell Dimension runs Vista with eth0 using DHCP on the primary internet and eth1 using a static IP on the private intranet.  It also runs VMware Workstation and has two custom vswitches, each bridging a single nic.    There’s no apparent problem with 192.168.1.0.

I’m also using static addresses for all VMs, the ESXs themselves, and everything on 192.168.2.0.  But for some reason I have limited connectivity across it.  I can connect from any VM on the ESX servers to any other VM on any ESX server, but not to the Dimension or any VM on it (inside Workstation).  Likewise any VM in Workstation can connect to another within it, but not any ESX.  I would think my Dimension`s nic1 was not configured properly except that I can connect from the laptop to it and vise versa.

Any ideas?

[ZosConsultingSe]

I figured out what was happening!

When I originally built the  VM inside Workstation, it was correctly configured so its eth0 was attached to VNET0 which was bridge to the physical nic1 while eth1 was attached to VNET9 which was bridged to nic2.  So far so good.

The problem is that whenI moved them to the ESX servers, although in the options I specified that eth0 would be attached to vswitch 0 and eth1 would be attached to vswitch 1, that's not what happened.  By using the vClient app to examine the ESX server, if I click on the Configure tab and then under Hardware select network I saw that for each VM it was only attached to vswitch 1, 2 was unused.  This meant that both eth0 and eth1 where attached to the same physical nic and lan segment.  This explains why I could ping between the VMs on ESX using their eth1s, they were going to the same, but wrong, physical network and why I could from physical machines on the private network.  Once I corrected that with a few clicks and restart of linux networking, it has worked prefectly!