Networking advice for updated lab

[rockitlikeithott]

Hey all. I'm starting to set up my new lab environment. I don't have much network architecture experience and was hoping some of you could help point me in the right direction. Basically I have a three host vSphere environment set up and Dell z9000 serving as a core switch for all of this. A pfsense box is currently handling DHCP and firewalling for my home. Inside of the vSphere environment I'm going to have a 3 domain "corporate environment" set up for red-teaming and pentesting research/practice. I'll also have some servers set up for stuff for my home (media servers and things like that). Finally I'll have an environment setup for malware research and exploit development. What I'm struggling with is setting up the network for all of this. Id like to keep everything segregated as much as possible and I just need some direction in how I should go about this. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[xnoodle]

You'll want multiple VLANs on the VMWare side and what's called trunking on the switch to facilitate the VLANs.

 

[rockitlikeithott]

You'll want multiple VLANs on the VMWare side and what's called trunking on the switch to facilitate the VLANs.

Yes I understand what needs to be implemented. Sorry I should have been more clear. I understand that I'll need multiple vlans and how to implement those vlans. What I'm looking for is some direction on the actual design of the network. Maybe I'm over-complicating things. Is the best way to do this really to just create vlans for each of the environments I plan on implementing?

 

[gea]

In my setups I have defined around a douzen of vlans in my switches and assigned physical ports on the switches to them. My switches and ESXi servers are connected with a single tagged 10G link that holds all vlans. In ESXi network settings, (vswitch property >> add) I create an entry for every vlan like vlan1 (manage), vlan2 (wan), vlan3 (san), vlan 4 (edu lan) etc.

On creating vnics, you can then assign a vlan to each vnic.
From a VM side, example Windows, you use a vnic for every vlan to separate traffic.

 

[rockitlikeithott]

In my setups I have defined around a douzen of vlans in my switches and assigned physical ports on the switches to them. My switches and ESXi servers are connected with a single tagged 10G link that holds all vlans. In ESXi network settings, (vswitch property >> add) I create an entry for every vlan like vlan1 (manage), vlan2 (wan), vlan3 (san), vlan 4 (edu lan) etc.

On creating vnics, you can then assign a vlan to each vnic.
From a VM side, example Windows, you use a vnic for every vlan to separate traffic.

Thanks this helps me a lot.