ESXi / Networking with 2 switches

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K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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Not sure whether to post this in the Networking Forums or here.

vlan.png

Blue Lines are 1g connections for management/vm traffic.
Red Lines are 10g connections for vMotion/VSan traffic.

I am not too familiar with networking concepts as well as VMWare.

The US-16-XG is a VLAN aware layer 2 switch. If I define the VLANS in the US-16-XG as well as in the Virtual switches on my hosts, will they be able to talk to each other or do I need routing here? Should I have a connection to my ER-X from the US-16-XG as well?

Currently, I am not able to see the other hosts through the vswitch connected to the 10gbe. Any pointers to how to make this work?
 

m_b

New Member
Feb 26, 2017
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When you say the hosts can't see each other through the 10gbe network, I'm assuming you mean you aren't able to ping from one ESXi host to another from the cli. A couple questions that might help diagnose what's going on:
  1. What are the IP addresses / masks on each interface of each ESXi host?
  2. Are there any vlans configured on the US-16-XG? Are the ports you're using configured as access ports or trunk ports?
Once you get the basic connectivity working, you should be able to add in VLANs to your configuration. If everything is set up correctly then you should be able to separate the network traffic from different groups of guests - they will be able to talk to other VMs on other hosts that are also connected into the same VLAN but not with guests on different VLANs. To enable inter-VLAN communication you will need to set up routing using a Layer 3 device / guest with connections into the different VLANs (I use a Layer 3 switch, but a small linux VM with multiple network interfaces can be just as effective).
 
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K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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Duh!!! Realized that all 3 hosts were on different subnets. Instead of 172.16.30.31,30.32 and 30.33 I had set them to 172.16.31.31, 32.32 and 33.33.

Corrected it and have basic connectivity now.

Thank you.