how to connect a physical NIC port to a VM in UCS

[Dragomir]

how do I connect a physical port to a VM in UCS? 

I need to connect a physical appliance (NIC port) directly to the VM. Is this possible or can I map a switch port on the nexus directly to the VM?

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

We see a similar question from customers trying to do some type of span/rspan config to try to send traffic off to a guestVm for analysis.

With the UCSM, trying to span to a guestVM (or blade for that matter) is not supported because of the way unknown unicast (what the majority of spanned traffic would be from UCSM's perspective) is processed (dropped).

You can setup some pinning rules or disjoint layer2 configs and only allow the vlan on specific virtual switch port-groups, to help isolate traffic to a specific guestVM, but it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

I'm assuming you are referring to the UCSM/FIs/chassis type config.

If you are talking about a rack server, then you may be able to setup direct I/O / pass through for the vnic to the guestVM.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Dragomir]

what would vmfex do in this situation?  VMfex allows me to map a VM directly to a physical NIC?

[Kirk J]

If you are talking about a standalone rack server, then yes, a passthrough type setup such as vm-fex could meet your needs.

Do be aware that the vm-fex support for VMware is not moving forward due to VMware Discontinuation of third party vSwitch program, so you will want to check your exact hardware, firmware, and esxi versions to see if your combination supports vmfex.

Are you trying to do some kind of span traffic funneling to the guestVM, or just want to simply dedicate a particular switch port for a guestVM?

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Dragomir]

correct span traffic