Use of Trunk Ports (Cisco) on the management interface

[CJRMAIL2k]

Hi All,

Background:

We are in the process of consolidating 2 esx server farms and will end up with 10 hosts in a single cluster. The hosts come from 2 separate VLAN's (lets say vlan 10 and vlan 20). As a test I have removed one of the hosts from HA/DRS and am testing with it. In order for HA and DRS to work efficiently and to properly pool all resources we want all vm's from both VLAN's to have access to move to any host in the cluster.

The test:

On my single host mentioned above, I have created 2 port groups on a vswitch, one tagged with vlan10 and one with vlan20 I deployed a VM and tried it on both IP ranges. This worked fine (with the correct IP settings set per VLAN) but as soon as we trunked the port used by the management network vmkernel port we lost connection to the HOST from a management perspective. What we need to know is whether it is possible to connect the Management network to a trunk port? We want to have 2 network interfaces connected to the vSwitch and both used for both VM traffic as well as management traffic. This is how they are currently set up except that the switch port is on a specific VLAN rather than trunked.

Many thanks,

Chris

[brunofernandez1]

Hi Chris

Yes, the management network also accepts vlan tagging/trunking.

You just have to add the VLAN number on the Portgroup.

Maybe you can make a printscreen with the actual configuration?

[CJRMAIL2k]

Thanks Bruno, I am sure I tried that but am going to have another go at it now and will let you know how it turns out.

Regards,

Chris

[vickey0rana]

Pl. also check if you have trunked both the switch ports those are used under vSwitch ? easy way to identify the same is do the redundancy test for vmnics of vSwitch.

[CJRMAIL2k]

Ok thanks both. The issue I had was that, after changing the port to trunk I would lose connectivity. Also if I changed the VLAN tag before then I would lose connection too. Eventually what I had to do was remove one of the NIC's from the vSwitch and create a new vSwitch, add that NIC there after it was configured as a trunk port. Create a management vmkernel port and give it an IP. THen I connected directly and removed the original vswitch and changed the IP onf the new Management port to be the same as the original. This gave me a connection on the trunked interface. THen I moved the second one over (trunked). Then I created 2 new vm port groups, one for each VLAN and moved the VM's onto them. Finally I deleted 'VM Network' port group from each host...

I am very happy now as we have much more capacity with the pooled resources and a lot more flexibility and redundancy.

Thanks again both for the help and I hope I made sense with the above explanation.

Cheers,

Chris