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demon_da
Contributor
Contributor

Migrate VMware workstation Virtual Network settings to VMware ESXi

I'm trying to migrate my vm guests from VMware workstation pro to a physical machine running VMware ESXi 6.7 .

Now i'm struggling to find out what are the equivalent Virtual Network settings for my ESXi.

ESXi machine has one physical nic at this moment which is connected to my home router in dhcp mode and has this ip: 192.168.1.101

Other settings are pretty much at defaults.

These are my VMware workstation pro settings in Virtual Network Editor: https://i.stack.imgur.com/i1AOd.jpg

vns.jpg

As you can see i have 4 VMnet's which all has different subnets. NAT(VMnet8) and VMnet3 has DHCP enabled.


So for more clarification here is an example of what i'm trying to accomplish, i hope it doesn't be more confusing:

Right now in my VMware workstation pro I have a pfsense guest with two network adapters: First one connected to NAT(VMnet8) and gets Internet from it, and second one's on VMnet1 and pfsense has enabled dhcp on it. My win7 guest with adapter connected to VMnet1 gets Internet from pfsense.

So in ESXi instead of my old NAT, i want to have a vSwitch(am i correct?) that can redistribute IP's from my home router to connected guests and act as a dhcp relay. (I don't know if ESXi's default vSwitch0 can do this?)

And i want to have 3 more different subnets to use them for an Internal network designing. Two of them should be exactly like my old VMnet1 and VMnet2 with simple IP settings so guests like pfsense may enable DHCP server on them. the third one should be a DHCP server itself and gives ip's to it's guests.

Again i'm sorry if couldn't be more clear.

Thank you in advance.

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jburen
Expert
Expert

Networking in ESXi is uncomparable with networking in VMware Workstation. You don't have built-in DHCP and for NAT you would have to use a router. So you could migrate your VM but you would have to build the networking yourself. Nothing out-of-the-box...

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