VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vswitch’

Managing and troubleshooting ESXi 4 can be a little alien when an administrator is used to the Service Console of ESX Classic. Specifically, troubleshooting remote connectivity to the ESX management interface after adding a second NIC involves local esxcfg-vswitch commands on ESX, but with ESXi the esxcfg commands are only available via the RCLI. Problem is you can’t use the RCLI if you lost remote management connectivity! Luckily, the local ESXi GUI lets you reconfigure your mistake and re establish remote connections.

Hit F2 on the ESXi Console and enter the System Configuration Menu

  Choose to Configure Management Network > Network Adapters

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VI3 Enterprise features VMotion, DRS, and HA require identical virtual networking settings on all of your ESX hosts. Unfortunately, VirtualCenter does not apply a central configuration policy or inheritance of settings from the cluster. Maybe a future version of VirtualCenter will evolve to include global configuration abilities? Until such a version is created, each ESX server’s virtual networking settings will continue to be configured individually by most administrators. However, there are some time saving, global configuration options available today. This post summarizes two methods provided by the virtualization community for creating PortGroups simultaneously across multiple ESX hosts. Read the rest of this entry »

A common issue after installing ESX servers that do not have all their NICs cabled is that you can not ping the host. For example, say you have an ESX host with 6 1GB network cards – 2 on board and 4 PCI. You would think that cabling the 2 on board cards would cover network connectivity. Unfortunately the order that ESX recognizes the NICs is not determined in a logical, expected order such as on board and then PCI cards. In fact, if you know how ESX determines how to order the network cards please comment and let us all know! In the meantime, here is how to use a few esxcfg- Console commands to make sure the cabled NICs are linked to the vSwitch that has the Service Console PortGroup (where the ip address is assigned).

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Every time I have to work with a customer’s networking engineers, or even my own Cisco consultants, I get funny looks when I have to tell them that there is not much to the nic teaming configuration on an ESX server.

Once a vSwitch is created it’s just a matter of assigning multiple physical NICs, creating port groups with the assigned VLANs, and setting the right policy. To the disbelief of the network guys, that can be done without adding any driver utilities or third party management software. After that ESX will load balance traffic headed out of the ESX host to the physical switch and provide redundancy for NIC fail over. Up to this point no changes to the switch are even needed.

On the physical switch side it does require more involved set up to provide inbound load balancing and setting up an ether channel. There are many guides already available on how to do this. Here are a few for reference:

ESX Server, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking – blog.scottlowe.org

VMware ESX Server 3 802.1Q VLAN Solutions