VMotion without trunking?

[chicagovm]

Greetings

My network team does not use trunking.

Is it possible to connect the esx host to the cisco port and still have VMotion? If so,what subnet would it need to be connected to or how would they conifgure the port?

thanks alot

[weinstein5]

Trunking is not necessary - as long as both vmkernel ports are on the same subnet there really is nothing extra that needs to be done -

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[lynxbat]

You can run your VMKernel directly on the same subnet and NICs as your VM's.

But it is against recommendations.

If you don't do trunking(VLAN) another option would be to have a dedicated switch(s) that you connect a NIC off each ESX server you want to VMotion to/from.

That would isolate the traffic and you could choose the subnet.

[jayolsen]

Just remember that Vmotion traffic is all clear text, which is one reason why it is recommended to be on an isloated network.

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

There is no need to trunk vMotion traffic. You can setup a pNIC <-> pSwitch Port for each vMotion pNIC on all your ESX hosts and you can either use a dedicated pSwitch or a VLAN on a pSwitch to do this. If you use a VLAN on a pSwitch this is called External Switch Tagging (EST). You can use multiple pNICs per host to multiple pSwitches as well and then you would trunk between the pSwitches in some fashion so that NIC Teaming works. But again that is not necessary but does present redundancy.


Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization