Currently the management vSwitch, VM vSwitch and Vcenter for our ESXi 4.1 hosts are in a single VLAN. I like to put the mangement and VM vSwitches in to their own seperate VLANs.
Current setup:
Esxi 4.1 hosts with two 4 port NICs.
Dell powerconnect 6248 switch with VLANs
VLAN 2: 192.168.2.0/24 - mamagement, VM, vMotion
New setup:
VLAN 2: 192.168.2.0/24 - VMs and vMotion
VLAN 3: 192.168.3.0/24 - Esxi Management vswitch and Vcenter server
I like to use one port from each 4 port NIC for the management so if one NIC goes down the other will allow access to the host. Both pNICs will go to the same VLAN on the same switch. I am bit unsure of what is involved. I added an extra pNIC to the management vswitch, connected it to new VLAN 3 and immeditaly lost the connection to the host. If I pull the cable off of the new pNIC, I can reconnect to the host. Do I need to put the ports where the pNICs connect on the 6248 in a LAG group? Can I not create a LAG on the 6248 and still be able to team the pNICs on the ESXi? The VLANs aren't tagged.
Also any suggestion on how to migrate the ESXi management pNICs from the old VLAN to the new VLAN with different IP subnet?
Thanks
LAG won't help. Since you have two pNICs in different VLANs, the portgroups that live on the existing vSwitch can't use both pNICs which are in different subnets. That's why you lost connectivity.
Create a new vSwitch, and add the new pNIC to that vSwitch, or edit the portgroup settings to make sure that new pNIC is not used by the management portgroup. The new vSwitch will be easier.
Since you have to perform actual IP changes, a simple migration of ports will not suffice. You'll need to change the portgroup and reIP the vm.
-KjB
I thought about creating a new vSwitch for the management, adding the new pNIC to it and connecting that to the new VLAN, but decided against it as it will mess up the vswitch numbering I already have.
I am not going to move the virtual machines vSwitch to a new VLAN. They will stay where they are now. So reIPing the VMs may not be required. The only thing I was going to move was the management vSwitch to a new VLAN. This is my curent vSwitch/portgroups setup:
vSwitch0:
portgroup: vmware management,vmotion - 192.168.2.1/24 - single pNIC
vSwitch1:
portgroup: iSCSI -192.168.10.0/24
vSwitch2:
portgroup: Virtual Machine - 192.168.2.0/24 vlan/subnet --- multiple pNICs
I just want to add an extra pNIC to the vSwtich0 and move the portgroup to the new vlan 192.168.3.0/24.
If you have 2x4 port cards, I would give vSwitch0/1 another pNIC a piece, so they both have redundancy.
-KjB
