VMWare ESXi 3.5 Setup With Multiple Subnets

[JeffEynon]

Hi,

I have VMWare ESXi 3.5 setup on an IBM blade center HS21. The ESXi host, and two virtual machines (SUSE linux) are all on different subnets (so there are three different subnets). They are all sharing one network card. There are two NICs on the server, but for reasons I don't understand (as I'm not a networking guru) only one is setup to work.

Anyway, I thought I had everything setup right and the machines all work for a time on the three different subnets. I was creating a Virtual Machine Port Group for each virtual machien subnet, and the VMKernel port was setup for my management network. So I had my VMWare Kernel setup for 10.102.0., (VLAN ID 40) one VMPort Group for 10.85.2. (VLAN ID 5) and one VMPort group for 10.85.3.0 (VLAN ID 6). This would work for a time until for whatever reason the virtual machines lose their network interface and I can only fix it by re-creating the VMs from scratch.

Am I doing this right? Is there a better way to do it? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff

[SR175]

One network card is tough for that. There are many places here that show best practices on networking but I would at minimum have 4 but preferably 6 PNics. You can have one pnic for your console and another pnic for vmotion. Then at least 2 for the virtual machine network. I run 4 for my vm network. Since you are using vlan id then use the vmotion network as your backup to the console and then viceversa. Use the console as a backup to your vmotion. This adds fault tolerance for those two networks. 2 or more nics just for your vm network also adds redundancy and bandwidth. This of course means more $$$ for network but if you already run a blade center then you already have a good investment there. Using this you can adjust if its too much for your situation. 2 guests is not really that many at all. If you don't need/want vmotion then forget about the vmotion nic.

[JeffEynon]

Well, I don't really have the option of more NICs because the server is what it is. This server is for development and test environments so I"m not that concerened about redundancy anyway.

So is it even possible to set the environment up this way and have it be stable?