Section 5.8. Solutions Fast Track

5.8. Solutions Fast Track

5.8.1.

5.8.1.1. Virtual Switches

Like a physical switch or hub, a virtual switch has a certain number of ports into which you can plug the virtual NIC of your virtual machines.

Virtual switches allow you to create VMnets and VMnics, both of which allow your virtual machines to pass network traffic. VMnets pass this traffic only within the ESX Server itself, while VMnics are bound to at least one physical NIC, which provides the ability to pass network traffic to your corporate intranet, the Internet, and other virtual machines.

Avirtual switch called a VMnet may be set up exclusively for routing highspeed network traffic between virtual machines on the same ESX Server.

5.8.1.2. Physical and Virtual NICs

You should have a minimum of two NICs for your ESX Server: one for the Service Console and the other dedicated to your virtual machines. It's through the physical NIC dedicated to your virtual machines that a virtual NIC can be attached to pass network traffic.

When you install ESX Server, the first NIC in the first PCI bus/slot that ESX detects will be the one it assigns to the ESX console.

Each virtual machine can have four virtual NICs.

Like any physical NIC, a virtual NIC can have one or more IP addresses and a MAC address.

5.8.1.3. MAC Addresses

MAC addresses are, by default, automatically assigned; however. VMware lets you manually assign them as well.

The MAC address is a six-byte hexadecimal number.

A recommendation you might want to follow if you are going to set MAC addresses manually is to pick a range of MAC addresses, say, 00:55:56:01:a1:zz, and only increment the last bit until you run out of values

5.8.1.4. Port Groups and VLANs

VMware provides for three types of VLAN or Port Groups: External Switch Tagging (EST), Virtual Switch Tagging (VST), and Virtual Guest Tagging (VGT).

Each port group represents one VLAN.

5.8.1.5. Networking Tools

A few command-line tools can assist you in managing the network infrastructure of your virtual environment, such as findnic, mii-tool, and others.

Use the service network restart command if you're having problems with the Service Console NIC

The findnic command allows you to bind an IP address to a vmnic.

mii-tool can be used to modify the NIC settings of your virtual server