Virtual Switch - Help with 8 NICS & 3 vlans

[VirtuallyNotHer]

Hello,

I just built an ESXi server that has 8 NICS and 3 of the nics are on separate vlans for dmz purposes.

I have the following and I am not getting 2 of the virtual switches to work when I add a NIC to the vm guest and set an IP.

Default virtual switch - I removed the virtual machine option from this so that it will only be used for mgmt of the esxi host. There is a static IP and all is working fine. 1 physical adapter is in this vswitch.

Vswitch2 - I put 1 physical adapter in this and it works when I set the static IP up on the virtual guest. It is in a separate vlan than the mgmt interface and with the great vmware client to manage the servers it is easy to identify the vlan (dmz really) the physical NIC is assigned to as it shows me the port range and even the cisco port it is plugged into.

vswitch 3 - this is setup identically to vswitch2, but this physical nic is plugged into a separate switch and on a separate vlan (another dmz), and I assign the static Ip to the virtual guest as I normally would and I can't get anything to ping or work. I verified the switch port is correct on the cisco switch by searching for the MAC and it comes back correctly. *What MAC should appear on each CISCO switch? Is it the mac of each physical NIC that is then assigned to each virtual switch? It looks like that but I want to verify as I was told the MAC of the guest would show up.

vswitch4 - exactly the same as vswitch 2 & 3, one physical nic and on another vlan, but it doesn't work and this is meant for a dedicated backup network, so I wouldn't have a default gateway as my goal is to assign this vswitch to all virtual guests to back them up as the backup server is segmented and can only be used on one vlan, thus the reason to have 1 vswitch for the standard traffic and the dedicated vswitch for backup purposes.

vswitch5 - this switch is setup with 4 physical nics and isn't working either. I believe one of the four nics might be unplugged though, so I have removed it from the switch.

Aside from getting this working, should I change any of the properties for the vswitch, the security settings, failover settings, or so forth? I read a few posts and someone pointed out that unless the vswitch is setup as 801.q or something such as that then the multiple vlans won't work, another post referenced that all virtual switches have to use routing using IP HASH, and yet another post noted that it should be the default on the NIC teaming and leave all items unchecked, and the last post I read was that it should be the default, just as the auto-created virtual switch is setup for NIC teaming, but the options that should be set are:

Route based on the originating virtual port ID

Link Status Only

Yes - notify switches

Yes - Fallback

Then it noted to ensure that override vswitch failover order was selected and then to leave the defaults which in my case are 1 physical NIC listed under active adpaters.

However where I have the one virtual switch with 4 physical nics then would I want to move some of the active adapters to standby or unused?