Newbe question about dual nic Host

[greasy]

I have a HP DL360 G5 with two nics.

What I am trying to get is Internet Access to all my VMs.

I am making a test lab that I do not want talk with my corp network.

I installed esxi 5.1.0X

vswitch0 has VM Network on it and Management Network with vmnic0 as the physical adapter

vmnic0 is the Management nic with IP 10.10.180.5 subnet 255.255.255.0 no gateway

I have a Domain control and exchange server for test purposes.

the physical nic is plug in to a 8 port Switch so I can plug laptops in to and they pull IP from the domain controller just fine so that's all good.

I need Internet access to do some updates on the servers so I need get them some access.

Now I have a spare internet connection that hands out IPs like 96.185.50.X

I plug that in vmnic1 the spare Internet access but no IP is assigned to it.

It created a Vswitch1 with VM Network 2 and vmnic2 is the Physical Adapter
How do I assign an IP the the second NIC and how do route Internet traffic between the vSwitches so the VM on other VM Network can get internet Access

Is this even possible?

Thanks

[EmanuelAlamo]

Hi,

You do not need to put each physical interface on a different network. You have the vmnic0 with the vmkernel port group for management, so you need to create virtual machine port group on the same vswitch (or in another one), and this virtual machine port group must have a way to get internet access, by a router or firewall, something that can route you to internet.

[cjscol · Accepted solution]

You could add a 2nd vNIC to each of your VMs and attach this to VM Network 2 but that will mean that each of your VMs will need an 96.185.50.X IP address, you will also need a default gateway and DNS on this interface, I guess this gets set with DHCP.

Or you could create a VM to be used as a router between VM Network 1 and VM Network 2. This VM will need two vNICs, one on VM Network 1 and one on VM Network 2. Give the VM Network 1 interface a static IP address on your 10.10.180.0/24 network and use this as the default gateway on your other VMs so that they use it to get out to the internet. You will need to configure DNS on your VMs so that they can resolve internet host names.