I am pretty new to VSphere, going to the install/configure class in Nov but had a consultant come in to do a dog & pony show and he said that we could do VLAN tagging to allow all of our VLAN's to communicate via a single distributed switch connected to 1 physical switch port. I can't get it to work though - can I get some hints on what I have wrong? Attached screenshot - any help is much appreciated
Yes - create 8 portgroups and assign each one a single VLAN and then assign your VMs to the appropriate portgroup.
You need ot make sure the physical switch is configured to do vlan tagging.
What kind of swithc do you have and how do you have it configured?
It looks like you have a configuration problem on you physical switch.
Are you doing it by yourself or have you got an seperate admin for doing this?
Also be sure thatyou port group has also the correct vlan marked!!
vSwitches operate in the same way as physical switches.
You will need to set up the Vlan tag on both the vSwitch and on the physical switch you arepatched into.
In addition, you will need to set up etherchannel trunks on the physical switch, if you are patching multiple nics on each vSwitch.
vSwitches tagged for vLan 4095 will process traffic to all VLANS so try setting your port group to use 4095 to start.
Verify connectivity, then work back from there,
Its a Cisco 2960G
here is the port config
interface GigabitEthernet0/22
description EIPPESX1
switchport trunk allowed vlan 1-500
switchport mode trunk
switchport nonegotiate
no cdp enable
spanning-tree portfast trunk
Not sure how I can test outside of VSphere?
The port group has VLAN 1-4094 - is that wrong?
Set the portgroup for the vlan that the servers are on rather than 1-500 and it will work. The way you have it setup the connections to the VMs are trunks so unless you have software on the VMs to handle, they will not communicate.
What I want to do is let VLAN tagging tell the traffic where to go - I have 8 active vlans and don't want to use 8 physical nic's - is that possible?
Yes - create 8 portgroups and assign each one a single VLAN and then assign your VMs to the appropriate portgroup.
With your current setup, you would be doing the vlan tagging in the guest OS. What I imagine you are looking for is the equivalent of a vlan on ESX. What you should do is set up a different port group for each vlan and connect them all to the same virtual switch, this will cause the packets to be tagged as they come out of the virtual switch on to the trunk and accomplish your goal.
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Thanks very much - that works very nicely!!!
can I cont this thread, trying same setup:
Physical switch is setup for trunking to both hosts, but still can't ping through...
Trying to get the a virtual vmdmz portgroup to work on vlan 1483, with the below setup I can ping host localy on the physical VM network, but nothing across on the virtual vmdmz network.
esxi host A
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
vSwitch0 64 18 64 1500 vmnic1
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
vmdmz 1483 6 vmnic1
VM Network 0 9 vmnic1
Management Network 0 1 vmnic1
esxi host B
Switch Name Num Ports Used Ports Configured Ports MTU Uplinks
vSwitch0 64 5 64 1500 vmnic0
PortGroup Name VLAN ID Used Ports Uplinks
vmdmz 1483 1 vmnic0
VM Network 0 1 vmnic0
Management Network 0 1 vmnic0
What native vlan did you get on the trunk?
It cannot be anything that will pass over the trunk.
it was the networking guy...
forgot to push the vlan configs down, it's working..
Damn packet pushers....