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dauphin77
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Enthusiast

Trying to configure an Internal Virtual Network within my vSphere Cluster - VM to VM ping while on different ESXi hosts does not work

Hello All-

I have configured an Internal Network on one of my ESXi Hosts that is part of a vSphere Cluster which consists of 4 - ESXi hosts with vDS, HA/DRS enabled. I have created a vDS Port Group with no VLAN and no Uplink and of course VM's can communicate without issue as long as they are on the same ESXi Host.

Is there a way to allow the VM's to communicate when on different ESXi Hosts so that we can make use of the Cluster and it's resources? This Internal Network will probably consist of near 100 VM's which is why we are trying to utilize the Cluster.

We have attempted numerous recommendation's listed on previous posts pertaining to same issue such as setting the Promiscuous Mode to Accept, modifying the Load Balancing options, modified the SCSI controller from VMware Paravirtual to LSI Logic Parallel and LSI Logic SAS, modified the Network Adapter from Type from VMXNET 3 to E1000E and vice versa for the VM's. Tried changing the Multicast filtering mode from Basic to IGMP/MLD snooping on the vDS.

We were able to make this work somehow in vSphere 6.5 and by the life of me I do not recall how we did it as it was over 2 years ago. Is there a way to bridge the ESXi hosts so the VM's will communicate on this Internal Network? Any guidance would be appreciated.

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daphnissov
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Is there a way to allow the VM's to communicate when on different ESXi Hosts so that we can make use of the Cluster and it's resources? This Internal Network will probably consist of near 100 VM's which is why we are trying to utilize the Cluster.

No, that isn't how networking works. In order for VMs to talk across ESXi hosts, they have to traverse a network, which means there has to be uplinks to route them to the physical world, and there has to be networks which live on the physical world to move packets. There are a variety of ways to go about this, probably the most common simply being a VLAN with no gateway, but you must have physical networks available.

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dauphin77
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@daphnissov

Thank you for the quick response.

Would something like this be possible with NSX?

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daphnissov
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Even with NSX, you still have to have an underlay network (physical network(s)) over which to carry the overlay traffic. There's no way to get around the need to have a physical network connecting physical ESXi hosts.

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