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rajeshn
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-29-2010 04:01 PM

Enabling communication between VM's hosted on 2 seperate ESXi hosts

Hi All,

Probably a simple question for many of you but I am new to Networking in VM.

I would like to enable communication between VM's that are hosted in 2 different ESXi hosts. The host hardware has 2 NICs. One of the NIC is connected to our enterprise network and the intention is to run VManagement & VKernel services on this NIC and use the second NIC to build an internal LAN that consists of VM's running on multiple ESXi hosts. The ESXi version is 4.1.

Appreciate your expert comments. A layout of the expected architecture is attached to this post for better understanding.

Feedback even in tips and hints will be appreciated. I will do the digging for details. Smiley Happy

Thanks & Regards

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership
‎09-29-2010 04:36 PM

Welcome to the Communities,

I assume you are talking about ESXi stand alone hosts and you have managed switches and VLAN in place.

In this case I would recommend you configure the physical switch ports as trunk ports (or "tagged" ports for Procurve switches) and do VLAN tagging on the virtual port groups. Therefore you create/use 1 vSwitch, attach both NICs to it and create multiple port groups on which you configure with the needed VLAN IDs.

This way you have a redundant connection in case one of the NICs or network cables fail.

see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf for details

One question: What do you mean with "VManagement & VKernel"? Actually, the management port group is the VMkernel.

André

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