L3 control , ESX cluster, VEM ip addressing

[baptiste_a]

Hello,

I am taking care of a design involving nexus 1010 and a cluster of ESX ( for now two ESXs ).

We are going to use l3 control as there is a couple of firewalls between the nexus 1010 and the ESX hosts.

I don't have much knowledge about ESX so I have a question about the implementation of the VEMs on the ESX cluster :

My plan is to create a new vmk interface for l3 control on the ESX in the same subnet as the ESX management one.

My question is how many ip addresses for L3 control will I need for a cluster of 2 ESX ? My guess is that I need one vmk interface per ESX ( same as management ) but I haven't found any information about this so far, so I want to make sure it's the case.

Thank you

Regards

Baptiste

[lwatta]

Do not put the new vmk interface on the same subnet as your mgmt vmk. Unfortunately VMware uses a single tcp/ip stack for the vmks and when it sees two vmks with the same subnet it doesn't always forward the traffic up the path you want. I would recommend migrating your mgmt vmk to the VEM module.If you don't want to do that then create a new vmk on a different subnet and assign that to the VEM. Be aware that if you do this you might need to create a static route on the ESXi host so that the new vmk knows how to get to the VSM.

If you have more questions let us know.

louis

[baptiste_a]

Hello Louis,

thanks for your feedback. Using a new subnet won't be easy for me so I guess I will use the ESX management vmk that I will migrate to VEM.

Cheers

Baptiste