ESXi host - combined

[SchouJ]

Hi all

I'm all new to this ESXi / vSpere setup, I hope that you can help me answer a question.

Previous, I worked with old fashion windows server / domain server/ client setup, one bare metal for each,  one project at a time.

Now I'm starting to configure a single server - one large ESXi host for all these projects combined. Each of the bare metal back then, are now running on each of their VMware machine, on this ESXi host. I'm using windows server 2016 as domain server and server and thin clients for RDP access.

Question:

The question is, how does the ESXi host handle the communication / separates the different virtual machines from each other ?

The reason to this question is that all projects have the same Domain name, but different subnet.   Such as,  192.168.51.xxx , 192.168.52.xxx  and so on..

I expect that the virtual machines on all projects are up and running on the same time, no VM's are shut down...

Do you know if it is possible that all Domain server and servers are running with exact same domain name but different subnet ??? there wont be any conflict between project ?

[scott28tt]

Chapters 1&2 should be enough to get you started with understanding the networking which ESXi uses: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-65-networking-guide.pdf

[IRIX201110141]

You think waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayy to complicated.

ESXi doesnt care about IPs, DNS, Routing, Domains and so on. Within the vNetworking for VMs you specify the way/flow of the packets and with 2 abstraction layers (Portgroup and Upink) he decouple the  VM Settings from the phys. environment(pNIC).

If you like you can send everything trough the same Portgroup, vSwitch and single Uplink and its your job as an Admin to take care not to configure  systems with same IP, broadcasts or deal with things like Windows AD.

Within ESXi you can do the same as in the phys. world to make life a little bit easier and use VLANs to separate networks.  Create Portgroups with a proper name for every customer/project and add a unique VLAN ID for every Portgroup so you dont have to mess around with VLANs in the Guest OS.

Regards,
Joerg

[NathanosBlightc]

Always consider this important rule: Operationality of virtual machines, and how the ESXi handles this workload is NOT related to their networking, including subnets, VLANs, domains, and so on. It means you can run multiple VMs that work on the different networks/domains on the same ESXi host. Computing, Networking, and Storage are separate management layers of the virtualization definition. Also ESXi doesn't interfere with the depth of a virtual machine guest OS and its operation, because they have separate workload layers (VMs and ESXi host) based on architecture.

You can run DCs that are working on different domain/forest and subnet/network ...

[SchouJ]

Thanx all!   that makes a lot more sens now.

And all that can be done without having access to vCenter ??.

[NathanosBlightc]

Exist of the vCenter server in your virtual infrastructure just cause to have a central point for managing every object in VI, so you can create new virtual machines, add new virtual switches (Standard or VSS type), define new datastore and so on without the vCenter server. Just whenever you want to define a cluster-level object and all of its related settings and also create a distributed vSwitch (VDS) you need to have the vCenter server