Fresh ESX 3/5 install. VM's have no network access

[MeGa611]

Hey everyone,

I'm new to running ESX server. I've been a fan of VMWARE Workstation and Fusion and now I am testing ESX Server 3.5 in thinking about moving our current setup to a virtual setup. I have installed ESX Server and I can connect to the server via VIC. I have created 3 VM's on the server (XP Pro, Win2k3 Ent & RHEL 4). Now each VM has a network adapter and they are connected to the VM Network. Is this just an internal network? I wanted the VM's to act as if they were on the same network as the server itself (NAT). Does this require the VMXNET driver or did I do something wrong during the setup. All help is appreciated and thanks in advance

[khughes]

The "VM Network" is just a port group on a virtual switch which has physical nics tied to it. Virtual Machines assigned to the port group mearly pass their traffic through the portgroup and out the physical nics assigned to it. Each Virtual Machine will have its own IP address, just like a physical server would have. How you have to look at it is you have 3 physical servers, all connecting to a physical swich to communicate with eachother. In the virtual world, you assign them to the portgroup so even though each Virtual Machine has its own virtual nic, all the traffic is being pushed out the physical nics assigned to the portgroup to the physical switch its connected to. In short, I'm not sure if you can run NAT off of an ESX server, but each server needs a unique IP address usually on the same subnet if you want to communicate with eachother.

• Kyle

[djciaro]

Via VMware Infrastructure client - open configuration tab - networking and check that you have a physical adapter connected to the Switch.

Check under Network adapters tab to make sure that your network adapters have connectivity and access to a range of IPs

Check your VMs and make sure that they have a VM network correctly assigned to the vNetwork card and that the device is shown with connected status.

You need to read up on configuring virtual networks, here is a good place to start:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!

[Texiwill]

Hello,

You may wish to review http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_prim.pdf as a starting point to understand how everything fits together within ESX.

There is a Service Console port, to which you connect your Virtual Infrastructure client to configure the server. Unlike Workstation/Fustion ESX/ESXi has different forms of networking.

Is this ESX or ESXi?

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

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

SearchVMware Blog: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/

Blue Gears Blogs - http://www.itworld.com/ and http://www.networkworld.com/community/haletky

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

[MeGa611]

This is for ESX 3.5 Server. Thanks for all of the replies. I will have to sit down and read the PDF that was posted to understand the networking structure of ESX Server better. I'm so used to just being able to allowing network access with a few clicks on workstation. I'm sure it's still just a few clicks but maybe it's the concept I'm not getting.