Network Isolation

[JKevinezz]

Good day all,

The scenario is the client wants us to leverage the corporate ESX environment that houses production servers and is on the production network. The issue is, how do we isolate the network traffic of our lab virtual machines, which is on the same hardware/farm as production servers, so that we do not bring down production eDir, AD, NT, etc. Unfortunately, there is no room for error!

[esiebert7625 · Accepted solution]

You can create Internal Only vSwitches (no NIC assigned to it) that you can attach your VM's to. Network traffic stays on that vSwitch and any VM's not attached to that vSwitch will not see the VM's that are attached. You can also create separate vSwitchs for your lab that connect to a certain NIC on ESX that connects to a isolated physical switch on your network.

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[juchestyle]

Create a virtual switch for just your production vms, and create another virtual swith just for your test/dev environment. You could even create seperate vlans for each group as well.

Respectfully,

[juchestyle]

Make sure your physical nics don't exist in both vswitches also.

Respectfully,

[Rumple]

If you need to transfer files between the production and LAb network then you can take a XP VM, leave it in a workgroup and then use that VM to bounce between prod and LAB to map and copies files as required.

[juchestyle]

To clarify what I think Rumple is saying: You could assign 2 nics to the xp box, one from each network so that it could communicate back and forth.

Respectfully,

[murreyaw]

Or make it all virtual, and use VLAN trunking to each nic. Put all the vms on the vswitches with the appropriate tags.

[esiebert7625]

Or to be even safer and more isolated so you are not bridging networks you could use one NIC for a workstation, assign it to the one vswitch, copy your files to it that you need to transfer and then move it to the other vswitch.