VMware Cloud Community
nhybgtvfr
Contributor
Contributor
‎08-18-2010 04:49 AM

vlan routing

hi,

i am about to takeover a network that has a couple of servers running esx3.5, i'm told both servers have four nics, configured on 2 different subnets. so each server has 2 ip's on the 192.168.1.* subnet and 2 ip's on the 10.10.10.* subnet. all eight nics are connected to 1 switch, the switch is configured with each port on a specific vlan, no trunking.

each server has multiple virtual servers, some only on the 10.10.10.* subnet, some only on the 192.168.1.* subnet. some on both subnets.

i understand that esx can run virtual switches/routers, so am wondering how inter-vlan routing is done. is it handled internally by the esx server, with no traffic actually traversing the physical network/switch, or is it all send to the physical switch/router and back to the esx server?

would i be better off aggregating nic pairs as trunks for each vlan, or all 4 nics as 1 trunk for both vlans?

sorry if all this is obvious stuff, i've never used esx before, so i'm not sure how it handles this, and i don't have access to the servers yet to see how they're actually configured, and the person i'm taking this over from isn't sure how it's done either. :smileyshocked:

thanks

lee.

Tags (3)
0 Kudos
2 Replies
a_p_
Leadership
Leadership
‎08-18-2010 05:18 AM

ESX(i) offers a lot of possibilities to configure networking. Instead of creating different vSwitches which are connected ot different VLAN ports on the physical switch, you could configure the physical switch ports as trunk ports and do the VLAN tagging on the virtual port groups of one vSwitch. Routing however is not part of ESX(i), this is always done on the physical side.

There are some things to consider though. You should use a dedicated vSwitch and uplinks for e.g. iSCSI traffic or vMotion.

For what you can do with ESX(i), take a look at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf

André

0 Kudos