Hello All,
I'm running ESXi Hypervisor 4.1. My server has 10 gigabit ethernet ports.
I would like to connect each of my (5) hosts to a physical port on the server instead of using a physical switch.
As I understand, a vSwitch will route traffice between virtual machines but use multiple physical NICs for redundancy or load balancing. I would like to have the vSwitch route the traffic between multiple physical NICs as well as the virtual ones.
If this is not possible - can anyone recomend an alternative such as a VM that will do the job.
Thanks
Hi Wizgui,
Welcome to the forums.
There is no routing mechanism in ESX or ESXi. You need to implement a router VM connected to the different networks. You can search Virtual Appliances Marketplace for such VMs or create your own: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/cat/0?k=router .
You should also have a look at the virtual networking concepts' document: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf .
Good luck.
Regards
Franck
Thanks for the reply.
I see that there are several options for VM routing.
pfsense, vyatta, freesco and open vSwitch. Can anyone recommend any of these for what I'm trying to achieve? Using serveral of my physical NICs as a switch. I'm trying to find the simplest solution which will have the best throughput.
Also, how should I configure the Vswitch that will be connected to the VM router? I presume that I need to let the VM router have as little intereference from the hypervisor as possible - how should I configure the 'Security' and 'Failover and Load balancing'?
Also, what would be the best way to connect my virtual guests to this network? I can either add them to the existing (VM routed) vSwitch(1) or create an additional vSwitch(2) and connect with a physical cable the uplink NIC of vswitch(2) with one of the uplink NICs on the VM routed network of Vswitch(1).
I've used vyatta as well as m0n0wall. You'll find that most will meet your needs.
You can leave the vSwitch security settings with the defaults.
Is there a reason you don't want to use a physical switch? Whether you go with 2 or 3 vSwitches I would think you would have connectivity issues with the physical hosts. The physical hosts would require a vSwitch with 5 NIC ports in the ESXi host. When a VM makes an outbound connection, the traffic is load balanced. In your case though only 1 of the 5 NIC ports in the vSwitch would actually work. If you were connecting to a physical switch any of the 5 ports in the vSwitch would work.
Personally I use Vyatta - simple to set up and plemty documentation available.
I've got a quick setup guide if you like:
although it was a guide for setting up the firewall, it shows all the Nattting etc.
simple to set up really - good luck
I agree Vyatta is fairly simple to setup and works great.
Duncan (VCDX)
Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive
thanks guys,
I'm getting closer to getting this to work.
I have created 8 vmswitches each connected to a single physical NIC.
Then I created a VM with 8 NICs each connected to one of the vswitches.
I tried pfsense first but found that it's preconfigured to have one NIC pointing to the WAN and the others in the LAN. It has a nice web interface but really overkill for what I'm trying to acheive.
I will try Vyatta now and if that doesn't work out then plain old ebtables.
My main concern is whether the switch will have decent performance - any ideas on how to optimize for speed?
Thanks for everyone's advice.
For anyone else with similar requirements:
For now I am using a program called LISA (short for Linux Switching Appliance)
LISA can do both L2 and L3 switching and configuration is similar to Cisco IOS.
Project Page: http://lisa.mindbit.ro/
Documentation: http://lisa.mindbit.ro/download/lisa/do ... -paper.pdf
http://lisa.mindbit.ro/download/lisa/do ... -paper.pdf
Seting it up was extremely simple:
1. Set up each of the NICs that I wanted in the switch, in a separate vswitch. Don't forget to set the NICs to promiscuous mode.
2. intsall LISA on (I used a Centos Guest) with all the above vswitches connected to it.
3. setup LISA:
swcli
S(config)# interface Ethernet 0
S(config)# interface Ethernet 1
[etc.]
S(config-if)#exit
Done