vLAN's: vm's - vMotion - Shared Storage

[2Tall2]

Hi. I have configured a test lab, set-up as follows:

ESX01 (ESXi v5) - HP-DL380-G5 (Dual GB NIC)

ESX02 (ESXi v5) - HP-DL380-G5 (Dual GB NIC)

I have installed OpenFiler on a third G5 and have configured iSCSI shared storage. This all hangs together on a layer 3 extreme switch (10/100 but vMotion still works ok).

I would like to create vLAN's to improve my knowledge in this area. I know how to create them at switch level, tag them etc but am not familar with the whole use concept within VMware. I am also limited by the number of NIC's on the hosts.

In my production environment (configured by third party) each host has 4 NICS. Two vSwitches are configured as follows:

vSwitch0

vmnic1

vmnic0

VMkernel Port

vMotion

vmk1 (ip x.x.x.x. VLAN ID 100)

VMkernel Port

Management

vmk0 (ip x.x.x.x. VLAN ID 200)

vSwitch1

Virtual Machine Port Group

Production

All VM's use his switch

Any advice on configuring vSwitches + adding vLAN's within my Test Lab on limited NIC's appreciated.

Phil.

[milton123]

You are looking good. You have to route VLAN if you wanna communicate each other.

Cheers, Udin

[HeathReynolds · Accepted solution]

You could duplicate your production enviroment with two virtual switches on each host, and just connect each vSwitch with one physical NIC. You won't have any redundancy, but this may be acceptable since this is a lab.

If you want redundancy you will need to create a single vSwitch, with both physical NICs connected to it. You would create all of your VMK interfaces and guest port groups on this switch, and allow all of the vlans on both trunks to the extreme switch.

In order to seperate your MGMT and VMotion traffic from your guest traffic you would need to go into the properties for each VMK or port group and select the option to "overide switch failover order". I would set the Vmotion active on physical NIC1, and standby on NIC2. I would set all other traffic active on NIC2, and standby on NIC1.

[2Tall2]

Thanks for the responses.

Phil.