VM IP not accessible from outside network

[Fatman2142]

Hi Guys

This maybe a complete newbe question,but I have been messing round with ESXi host and come across a problem that i have spent the last 2 days troubleshooting.I have a ESXi box running in my room thats attached to my network..what i am trying to do is make it so that the VMs running on this machine is accessible to my PC outside of the ESXi box...the problem is that i can't RDP any VMs from outside as they are being administrated by the VMswitch..

I have used wireshark to determine the Ip source when i ping my PC from the VM and found that it has been given the static ip of the ESXI server..

Does anyone know of a work around? I would like to assign a static ip to the VM so i can use it as FTP server for my network outside of the ESXI box

Thanks in advance!!

[golddiggie]

If the entire thing was set up correctly, there wouldn't need to be any kind of work-around. I have two servers that I access from outside my home network, and several more VM's that I can access from inside my network. I have the two outside facing with port forwarding through my router to make sure that works.

How many physcial NIC's are in your ESXi host? You need to have some of the networking assigned for VM traffic. Without that, you won't be able to connect to those VM's other than with the vCenter/vSphere console. You should have one vSwitch for the management console traffic and at least one other for virtual system traffic.

I've attached a screenshot of the way my vSwitches are configured. Hopefully it will help to clear things up for you.

VCP4

[Fatman2142]

Hey golddiggie,

thanks for replying! I only have one NIC attached (ie motherboard).. so it looks like i need to buy another NIC inorder to make it work?

will that mean i can then assign IPs to the VMs, that then will be seen on my home network, so i can RDP via IP or Hostname?

[golddiggie · Accepted solution]

Once you've assigned the additional NIC(s) to the VM traffic you should be good to go.

I use RDP among other modes, to manage different servers on my LAN. If you want to have the FTP server accessible from outside the LAN (such as from a different location) then you'll want to use port forwarding on your router to that VM's IP address. Look at the free services from www.dyndns.com to make that happen via an url instead of having to worry about your public IP address changing. I use their services (free ones for now) to access both my ftp server and web server (two different Linux servers that are VM's on my ESXi host). I have RDP set up for my DC and vCenter servers specifically so that I can connect to them even if other methods are not functioning properly.

Feel free to reach out to me via PM if you need some additional assistance getting things online. Be sure that the additional NIC you pick up is on the HCL. I would go with at least a dual port card if I was you. I favor Intel NIC's inside my ESX hosts. Right now, I'm running a dual port and quad port NIC inside my host. Adding that to the onboard (Broadcom NIC) gives me a total of seven NIC's to play with.

VCP4

[Nikhil_Patwa]

Hi,

You do not require additional NIC as the one on board can work, I have 3 ESXi servers with many production VMs and in all ESXi Host servers I have only 1 NIC. What you need to check is your ESXi Networking, make sure your Host NIC is attached to the Management Network as well as the Virtual Switch that connects all the VMs to the Host NIC. I also have a DHCP server outside the ESXi servers on my LAN and my VMs are able to get IP from the DHCP server.

You could even create a VM with VPN configured that acts as a router to enable communication between 2 different IP ranges.

Regards,

Nikhil