VMWare 5.1 and Cisco UCS Networking

[John Stacy]

All,

We recently have purchased some B200-M4 blades to move our VMware environment over to. I have been doing alot of reading on what people think the network configuration should be for running VMWare on Cisco UCS blades. Does anyone have a guide or can point me to a guide that covers vNIC configuration best practices when it comes to a VMWare 5.1 host. Specifically covering the configuration of using multiple VLAN's over a single vNIC.

Thank You

[Chris Carlson]

What exactly do you want to know about using multiple vlans on a vnic?

[John Stacy]

Well,

I deployed ESXi like normal. and I setup several vNIC's two of those vNIC's I attached to a vSwitch that is for VM's to chatter down. I have lets say 5 VLAN's that I have assigned to the vNIC's and then I assign 5 separate VM Port groups to the vSwitch. Now weather or not I turn tagging on for each port group or I do not define the VLAN for each Port group I cannot get VM's in those port groups to communicate out. 

If I assign a vSwitch to separate vNIC's and single VM Port group to each vSwitch and a single VLAN to each vNIC I can get them to communicate correctly... however there has got to be a way that I can run multiple Port Groups on a single vSwitch over one teamed set of adapters...

I hope that is clearer than mud...

Thanks

[Chris Carlson]

when you do vsphere distributed switch make sure when you go into and edit your uplinks you are trunking the vlans you need to be. IE 0-4094. and in your port groups you are defining the vlan you want to use for each port group

in the teaming and failover portion of the port group setup make sure that your uplinks you want to use are in the active uplinks portion.

[John Stacy]

How should I configure the vNIC,s in UCS. do I assign VLAN's to them or do I assign No VLAN's?

Does that make since?

[Walter Dey]

It's mandatory that you assign one or multiple vlans to every vnic in a service Profile; one of them might be the native vlan.

[Keny Perez]

The vLANs you assign to the vNIC in UCSM are those that you will allow for the vNIC and then you may decide what vLAN wont be tag setting it up as Native.   If you do not give any vLANs you wont have communication, other than that one going over the default native vlan.

-Kenny