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HendersonD
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Service Console, switch work, access ports to trunk ports, questions

If you look at the diagram below, you will see our Service Console on a separate vSwitch with an IP address of 10.121.125.108. I want to add a vKernel port to this same vSwitch for vMotion. Right now I have vMotion on vSwitch1 with my iSCSI traffic which is not best practice. The vKernel port I want to add will have an IP address 10.121.127.108 since I want vMotion traffic in a separate vLAN. The problem becomes the two physical switches that support vSwtich0, they are configured as access ports. If I want traffic from vlan 125 (Service Console) and vlan 127 (vMotion) to travel across these switches, I need to change these into trunk ports and use vLan tagging. The work on these two switches, which happen to be in an IBM BladeCenter, as well as my 6509 core switch is not difficult. You can see by the second graphic below the type of statement changes I need to make. The question becomes how to do this when the Service Console is involved. How do I do this and not lose access to my Service Console? Should I disable DRS and HA first? Can I do one switch, somehow verify connectivity, and then do the other one?

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HendersonD
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Well, I answered my own question. Since vMotion for all three of my ESX servers will use an IP address in the same vlan, I do not need to route this traffic at all. I just added the vKernel port, gate it an IP address and the proper mask but left the gateway field empty. It squaks at you but after doing a bit of research there is no reason to have the gateway for vMotion traffic.

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