revisiting the separation of networks

[plana215]

i have for sometime been using a lab with 4 supermicro mini servers to try to learn more and I had a reasonably good setup with cisco switch and pfsense vm handling routing and vlans.

Recently I switched to unifi usg and their 48 port poe switch to do things which required a POE switch.  After a few changes I thought I had reconfigured everything to handle it as before with pfsense (vlan 200 192.168.200 for management network and everything else on main subnet 192.168.50).  this was having intermittent connectivity issues when trying to connect to vcsa which was ip address 192.168.200.5 but was using vm network not the management network vlan 200.  I started to realize from google searches that the vcsa was not intended to be on that management network if I understood the documents correctly.  so forgive the confusion and simplicity of the question but i have not been able to find an explanation i understand well to adapt it to the new unifi switch.  If the vcsa is to be accessible from my laptop which uses wifi to connect and it typically on the 192.168.50 segment, do I have to make a separate management vlan wifi network allowing vlan 200 (with 192.168.200 range) and connect my laptop to that wifi network in order to access the vcsa which is on the 192.168.200 ip range?  if I recall correctly when I had prior setup and had originally had the vcsa IP on the 192.168.50 network it could not  connect to the esxi hosts 192.168.200.7 through 192.168.200.10.  Essentially my question comes down to the fact that if the vcsa cannot use the management network (its not ever a choice during install only VM Network) what is the best arrangement to allow it access to the management vlan and the laptop I connect from to adminster the system.  TIA

[vmrale]

Hi,

an answer is simple. vCenter equipped with one interface (eth0) should be in the same IP subnet (Management Network) to be able to manage hosts. If you want to get an access to vCenter from your laptop you should configure its interface to be able to communicate in this subnet (Management Network).

[plana215]

thanks that is the way i had it previously but the unifi seems to be forcing me to give the 192.168.200 network it is routing a vlan number also (i chose 200). I will give it a shot with configuring the laptop for that subnet.  So just for clarity the management network that is setup by esxi is NOT the network that the vcsa shows it is connected to -- will try to get a screenshot.

when i tried to remove the vlan 200 it wouldn't allow it.  I'm probably totally wrong but if that laptop is connected to that lan segment 192.168.200 then it is tagging all that traffic from laptop with 200 and so if the VM network that the vcsa is connected to doesn't have VLAN 200 (like management network does) then they cannot communicate ... even if the laptop has a static ip set of say 192.168.200.44?

[vmrale]

Send me please a screenshot of esxtop in network view from this host. I want to see which uplink is used by vcsa. I suppose vmk0 is using vmnic0.

[plana215]

this view?