Adding Secondary Management NIC to ESXi Host

[c10gue]

Hi,

We currently have request from a customer to add a secondary management NIC to two ESXi servers so both ourselves and the customer can connect to the hosts if vCenter becomes unavailable.

Can someone confirm if this is feasible or will the hosts get confused and become unreachable? Sorry if this is an obvious answer it’s just I've only ever seen configuration with one management NIC.

Thanks in advance.

[MKguy · Accepted solution]

We currently have request from a customer to add a secondary management NIC to two ESXi servers so both ourselves and the customer can connect to the hosts if vCenter becomes unavailable.

Can you clarify what exactly you mean by that? A single management interface can be accessed by whatever many different clients as long as it's reachable. Are there networking limitations where the customer manages the ESXi host from an internal network and you have to access it externally through another, public IP for management?

In that case your would create a 2nd vmkernel management interface on the external network, and to cope with routing set the default route to the external gateway and insert static routes for the internal networks using the internal network gateway. So basically the same thing you would do for any multi-homed IP system.