VSPhere 2 NIC setup assistance please

[CyberPro60]

I am new to VMWare virtualisation and I am in the process of setting up a VSPhere server to handle Zentyal/Linux based domain management system.

So far I have managed to get our VSPhere server up and running except for one thing - dual network card setup!

I cannot work out is how to configure our server to utilise two network cards (NICs).

This is the configuration I would like:

Network card 0 (vmnc0) (External link) connected to a modem/router (10.1.1.1) with fixed ip of 10.1.1.2

Network card 1 (vmnc1) (Internal link with ip of 10.1.2.1) connected to the local lan network providing an address range of 10.1.2.100 to 10.1.2.200

So far I have been able to get only the management interface operational on vmnc1 using the ip address of 10.1.2.1

In the VSPhere client I can see the second NIC but I figure out how to setup the IP address of this adapter to 10.1.1.2 or to set the default DNS IP address to 10.1.1.1 (if I try to use this IPaddress VSPhere throws an error)

I have trawled through most of the VSPhere online documentation but little seems to be little mention of dual nic setup. Is there a resource online that would help me sort out this installation or can somebody please provide some help solving this problem.

[rickardnobel]

CyberPro60 wrote:

In the VSPhere client I can see the second NIC but I figure out how to setup the IP address of this adapter to 10.1.1.2 or to set the default DNS IP address to 10.1.1.1

The main confusion here is that the vmnics inside ESXi is not logically a traditional ethernet NIC, but instead is a link up to a virtual switch. On this switch you will then create virtual machines, which can have ordinary IP addresses, however neither vSwitches or vmnics do have IPs.

[amvmware]

You should see the two physical nics as the connection point between the physical network and the virtual network. You do not assign IP addresses to the nics. The IP you have supplied is the management ip for the vsphere host.

I would ideally like at least 4 nics to be able to separate managment and vmotion traffic from VM traffic. but if you have a pair of nics and a single virtual switch then the trafic will load balance across the physical nics if configured to.