Distributed Switch Question

[AmazingTed]

Hi, i have a VDS that i have created and pushed to 3 hosts in a VSAN Cluster, all hosts are showin in this VDS and the VDS has no physical uplinks.

I have then created a port group on the VDS and added in a single NIC from 4 VM's all on different hosts in the cluster, however only when 2 VM's are on the same host can they see each other if i have a VM1 on Host 1 and a VM2 on Host 2 they can't see each other only if i have a VM3 and VM4 both on H2 for example can they see each other....

Everything looks fine but i dont see how the VM's could ever see each other without a physical NIC somewhere linking them and their hosts, that said i want it to be a port group that only these VM;s can access isolated from any other network like a vSwitch with no uplinks on a single host.

This is my working VDS:

Works as expected as i have Physical uplinks in there

This is my non working vDS:

Not working as expected - no physical uplinks

However if i wanted a port group just for internal VMs within the cluster would i have to just create a port group on the first picture and then use VLAN's to segregate my traffic, is there a way to stretch an uplink-less vDS across multiple hosts in a cluster?

I almost dont want the VM's to have ANY interaction with the physical network.

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

is there a way to stretch an uplink-less vDS across multiple hosts in a cluster?

Think about that for a second. How can a VM on one host talk to another VM on another host if it doesn't have a path to that other host? The answer is "no" here. If you want a private channel of communication, you can either use a dedicate uplink which is connected to an isolated switch, use a dedicated VLAN which has no routes, or a private VLAN assuming your hardware is capable. For VMs on one host to talk to VMs on any other hosts, it has to go through a "wire" of some sort. There's no magic that a vDS imbues in that regard.