Update visible networks in vmnic/vSwitch

[kristinnE]

Up until now I've had 3 VLANs visible to my vSwtich, let's call them VLAN 10, 800 and 999. My network has many more VLANs configured but those were the only ones that were trunked to the port my ESX server is connected to. So far everything has worked just fine ( and still does ), I can put machines to VLAN 10 or VLAN 800 and they connect to what they have access to.

Recently I added another VLAN to the trunk, called VLAN 200 but it doesn't show up in the range list of observed IP ranges of my vmnic and the VM I add to that VLAN doesn't get any network connection.

I thought it was enough just to add the VLAN to the trunk, create a new Virtual Machine Port Group and everything should be fine. Do I have to restart my adapter, reboot the host or is there something very simply I'm overlooking?

[runclear]

from the VI client under the networking settings, did you click "refresh" after you made your change?

[kristinnE]

Yes

my vmnic0 shows the VLANs that were accessible before the change ( in Observed IP ranges ), but not the one I added.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I am not sure this will change much. Observed IP ranges are not explained well and often incorrect.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
Blue Gears and SearchVMware Pro Blogs -- Top Virtualization Security Links -- Virtualization Security Round Table Podcast

[Lightbulb]

Should work. check out the "Final notes" section of the following post

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2006/12/04/esx-server-nic-teaming-and-vlan-trunking/

Might be some help.

[dnetz]

Is the newly added VLAN not working? I'm pretty sure that the "observed ip ranges" field is a qualified guess of what IP ranges exist on a particular VLAN, either by ESX looking at the traffic or by looking at what IP and subnet settings the vNICs have. Since VLAN is layer 2 and IP subnets are layer 3, there's no relation between those two.

Double check that your pSwitch is actually sending VLAN 200 tagged to your ESX host, some network admins might think you meant untagged while it's actually tagged you want.

[Smiddie · Accepted solution]

Have your network admins check the vlans allowed setting on the pswitch. Could be they are not allowing all vlans but limited it to the ones you had configured and now the new one has to be added.

Regards,

Raymond

[kristinnE]

OK, so this was indeed something a bit stupid on my behalf as usual...

Turns out the switch was configured as Transparent and VLAN 200 didn't exist on that switch. We want to keep it in transparent mode because this is a blade switch with iSCSI VLAN configured and we don't want to let that leak out to the other switches.

So the real solution was just to create a VLAN on the pswitch with ID 200 and suddenly the flow became normal.

Thank you all for all your help.

oh, and by the way. After the pswitch was correctly configured, observed IP ranges came through correctly.