Data traffic between VMs within same VLAN go through physical switches with one uplink

[wayne_L]

I have a question when trying configure server and catalyst switches. Like the attached picture, the server only have one physical port and used as the uplink for the distributed switch. The three VMs should be in the same VLAN, and data traffic between them should go through SW1 and SW2 (3560 or even 3550). I tried some basic methods but not work.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance!

[0aae0]

Basically, it's intra-host traffic. so ESXi will not send it to uplink. It's basic optimization in virtualization environment.

But if you're using vDS, you can trying PVLAN isolation mode to achieve this.

[JDMils_Interact]

One thing to consider: If you have one vLAN configured multiple times on the host, say, you have vLAN 1000 on the Standard Switch for host management, then you have your vCenter on vLAN1000 as a VM on the VDS switch, traffic will not be routed between the two devices, so your vCenter will lose communication to the host as the upstream switch, if configured correctly, will reject traffic for the same vLAN on the same uplink. I'm only using this example because this has happened to me. The solution here was to pin vLAN1000 on the Standard Switch to say Uplink01 and pin vLAN1000 on the VDS switch to Uplink02 in order to separate the vLAN traffic between the targets via different uplinks.