Networking configuration for ESX or ESXi Part 1 VMwaremine Artur Krzywdzinski. During last couple of weeks I have been actively browsing VMware communities, trying to solve users technical problems. ESXi or ESX networking configuration, networking best practice or how to set up properly networking on ESX or ESXi servers. I decided to post recommendation about VMware v. So in my lab, I was able to add custom drivers and remove drivers from the original VMware ESXi 6. ISO. The resulted image was then exported as ISO or it can be used. Sphere. 4 networking configuration and v. Sphere networking Best Practice. The fundamental rules in networking are as follows Keep separate ESXi or ESX management traffic from other traffic v. Motion, FT, virtual machineAvoid SPOF Single Point Of Failure redundant physical switches, physical networks for all type of trafficv. Motion traffic should go through not routed separate IP subnet network, due to security reasons v. Motion traffic is not encryptedv. Motion traffic needs 1. Gbps connection. Storage NFS, i. SCSI traffic should be isolated from other type of traffic on physical level separate p. NIC and v. LANIDStorage traffic need at least 1. Gbps connection to give enough throughput and low latency to storage. Scenario 1 4 NICs 1. Gbps standard switch used for MGMT, v. Motion and VM traffic and i. SCSI traffic. ESX ESXi 4 vmnic networking configuration. Physical host has 4 NIC two dual ports, each has 1. I have got the ESXi 6. ESXi 5. 1 up and running and it even picks up an IP from DHCP, however I am not able to connect to it with putty, no ping to. Gbps speed  that hardware configuration is very common in solutions  for Small and Medium business. Switch. 0 has two vmnics vmnic. ESXi management mgmt and  second for v. Motion, each vmnic is connected to different physical switch p. Switch. 1 and p. Switch. In Mgmt portgroup vmnic. Active and vmnic. As part of my home lab I installed ESXi 6. Desktops, the PC has a Realtek 8168 network card built into the motherboard. To do so using ESXCLI, run the following command and specify the name of your vSwitch esxcli network vswitch standard uplink add u vusb0 v vSwitch0. FlexPod Datacenter with VMware vSphere 6. Deployment Guide for FlexPod with VMware vSphere 6. NetApp AFF 8000 Series and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches for. Mpeg-4 Aac Lc Codec Virtualdub here. Standby, in v. Motion port group vmnic. Standby vmnic. 2 is Active. Using ActiveStandby approach for MGMT and v. Motion traffic provides separation on hardware level between both networks. What does it mean v. Motion traffic consumes as much network traffic as it can get, putting it on different vmnic one we are sure that it will not saturate mgmt vmnic and  affect ESXi management traffic. Saturation of mgmt vmnic could cause host isolation and automatic depends on policy VM restart on other hosts in a cluster management interface is used for hearth beats exchange between nodes in a cluster. Switchportgroupstatev. LANIDp. Switchvmnic. Swtich. 0mgmtv. Motionactive in mgmtpassive in v. Motion. 10, 2. 0Switch. VMi. SCSIactive in i. SCSIpassive in VMLAN3. Switch. 1vmnic. 2dual NIC 1v. Swtich. 0mgmtv. Motionactive in v. Motionpassive in mgmt. Switch. 2vmnic. 3dual NIC 1vswitch. VMi. SCSIactive in VMLANpassive in i. SCSI3. 0, 4. 0Switch. The v. Switch should be configured as follows Promiscuous mode Reject. MAC address changes Reject. Forget Transmits Reject. Load balancing route based on the originating virtual port ID defaultNetwork failover detection link status only. Notify switches Yes. Failback Nov. Switch. VM traffic and storage traffic here i. SCSI  v. Switch. VLAN trunking is used to give connectivity for both network segments on each vmnic. Like in a v. Switch. Active and Standby approach was used to keep both traffic separated on hardware layer and in ESXi layer. The v. Switch. 1 should be configured as follows Promiscuous mode Reject. MAC address changes Reject. Forget Transmits Reject. Load balancing route based on the originating virtual port ID defaultNetwork failover detection link status only. Notify switches Yes. Failback No. Implementing ActiveStandby approach is very efficient way to follow VMware Best Practice and compromise between costs and performance. Above example design provides hardware redundancy and fail over for all networks and follow VMware network best practice standards. See links below for different networking configuration. ESX and ESXi networking configuration for 4 NICs on standard and distributed switches. ESX and ESXi networking configuration for 6 NICs on standard and distributed switches ESX and ESXi networking configuration for 1. NICs on standard and distibuted switches. ESX and ESXi networking configuration for 4 x. Gbps NICs on standard and distributed switches. ESX and ESXi networking configuration for 2 x 1. Gbps NICs on standard and distributed switchesbox.