VDS and vlans

[beckhamk]

If i recall i believe that VDS in vsphere support vlans. My question is these vlans on a vds are strictly internal to the VDS itself and has nothing to do with a physical network switch?

[mcowger]

No - they can relate to the VLANs on the physical switch if the uplinks are configured to support 802.1q trunking.

--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[rievax · Accepted solution]

Bechhamk,

I guess you should tell us more about what you are thinking about. The VLAN configuration for the dvSwitch (named "Private VLAN") is meant to create VLAN IDs in your virtual private network that won't be used on your physical LAN. You don't participate in creating your routing infrastructure for your LAN core here... Is that what you were asking?

Cheers,

Rievax.

[beckhamk]

The Private VLANS was exactly what i was talking about. which is nice to know and also that we could use vlans on the physical switch.

Question, we are investigating this before we upgrade our licenses. But how does one associate a pvlan with a vm? Is there a limit to the number of private vlans that you can setup for different vm's. I know there might be throughput issues at some point, just wanted to know if there was a low limit ie: 255 per vds?

Thanks to all who responded!

[rievax]

Hello,

It looks like you are mixing things. The introduction in ESX 4 of the vDS and its private VLANs has nothing to do with the ability of a VM to access a VLAN configured in your physical network. You can already do that in ESX 3.x if you connect your physical NICs to physical ports on your switch where you tagged multiple VLANs... when you create your regular vSwitch in ESX 3.x you can define multiple networks with different VLANs and then assign your VM NIC to it. What are you exactly looking at? Connect a VM with a single NIC on multiple VLANs? Have a switch where multiple VMs will be able to connect to a specific network / tagged VLAN?

[beckhamk]

We are hoping to get a VDS setup on our internal lan and then use private vlans on this vds to seperate multiple vms from each other without having to create multiple vds's. So have vm1 and vm2 on vlan200, then vm3 and vm4 on vlan201 on the same vds.

[rievax]

Yes. That is exactly what you will be able to do.

Create a vDS (dvSwitch) with private primary VLANs that could also have secondary Isolated and Community VLAN IDs.

Then, you will define your Port Groups. Port groups could either be configured as VLAN type "none" or "VLAN": that is the same as ESX 3.x. You will also have two more options: "VLAN Trunking" where you select the ID / ID range you would like to trunk and "Private VLAN" where you will be able to select the private VLAN you have created on step ~1.

In order to be able to assign a vDS to your physical hosts, they must have an Enterprise Plus license...