Home Lab Network question

[toyosi]

I have recently gotten a couple of HP DL360 G4s and a NAS that I think support NFS and want to set up a home lab using ESXi 4.1. I have also gotten a couple of dual port NIC card to add to the servers for more physical NICs. I am a bit confused on the networking side, I do have a 8 port GBit switch I could connect all this to but it is unmanaged and that means no VLAN configuration. How can I make this work if I want to put the NAS as NFS on my network with access to the internet?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[logiboy123]

Suggested reading;

Section - Networking

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_esxi_server_config.pdf

http://www.kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vsphere-host-nic-design-6-nics.html

Essentially you will probably end up with a single vSwitch per host that will do;

Management

vMotion

VM Networking

Storage

Typcially we try to seperate out these functions depending on VLAN availability and vSphere licensing. But in a home lab using a single subnet for everything is fine.

[AndreTheGiant]

Welcome to the community.

You can make an entire lab with a single NIC for each host and also without VLAN.

But this mean that you cannot test VLAN and similar configuration...

Andre

[toyosi]

Thanks for the tips guys. I ended up installing ESXi on the 2 machines and I am currently using only 1 NIC out of 4 on each server (complication on installing 64bit VM as VT is not available. Dumb Me not checking) will finagle another box that is VT capable and install the VMware Vcenter server on that.

Quick question though, since I have an unmanaged switch and cannot do VLANs yet, can I have multiple uplinks on the standard vSwitch connected to the same subnet?

Again thanks for all the help so far

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

...since I have an unmanaged switch and cannot do VLANs yet, can I have  multiple uplinks on the standard vSwitch connected to the same subnet?

As long as you use the default vSwitch policy "Route based on originating port id", this should work.

André

[toyosi]

Thanks for the answer. greatly appreciated