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Jay ThomasFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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vmware work station network editor problem

My setup - standard home setup , router on 192.168.0.1 and all host on that network

VMware workstation host 192.168.0.50
1 x ESXi 6 hosts with ip 192.168.0.200

I can't get the ESXi host to talk to anything. The network editor always seems overly complicated with it's hundreds of configuration options. For gods sake all i want is to get the dam ESXi host talking to other hosts on my home network. With Hyper-V i add a virtual switch and point it to a NIC, and I'm done, none of this crap about NAT, Bridge, Share, DHCP, no wonder people are moving to MSFT.
If anyone can point out where I'm going wrong I'd appreciate it.
Tanks all.
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Okay, it this complication caused by a ESXi 6.0 host which is a virtual guest on VMware Workstation ?

or is your ESXi 6.0 host a physical host ?

Hyper-V is a Type 1 Hypervisor, VMware Workstation is a an application installed on a Host, which is a Type 2 Hypervisor.

It's really like comparing apples and pears, unless you install ESXi on bare metal!

So I assume this ESXi is installed as a virtual machine, and therefore it's comparison would be to install Hyper-V also in a VM, under VMware Workstation.

Anyway back to your issue ?

ESXi 6.0 installed as a virtual machine ?
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Hi Andrew - that's my rant out the way, but sitting here 3 hours and getting no where kind of pS you off.

So, yes, VMware Wk Station 11. I haves 4 ESXi 5.5 Virtual hosts, although at this point i am only trying to get one of them working. The IP address for esxi01 is 192.168.0.200, but it cannot even ping the router.
I figure it's the VMware network editor so i restore defaults it to be safe. So, i now have the 3 default networks. So i assume i can go to the esxi network settings and point the network at "VMnet0 auto bridging" and I'm good to go. Nope, still does not work. I do the network test inside esxi and it still can't ping 192.168.0.1, but the Windows 2012 r2 it sits on can.

Any help appreciated.
Okay.....

First thing to do is....

Reset the Virtual Network Editor to Defaults, and leave well alone.

Configure ALL virtual machines to use BRIDGED NETWORKING, and ALL ESXi servers to use BRIDGED NETWORKING.

If you use DHCP on your network from your router, then use this for DHCP across your network or make sure you assign static IP Addresses in the network subnet you are using.

Also ESXi VMs under VMware Workstation *MUST* use E1000 virtual network interface.

Also final tweak when using ESXi as a *NESTED* Virtual Machine under VMware Workstation is to use a special VLAN ID.

ALL (4095) on ALL your Networks which are configured on the ESXi Hosts.


So if you are using the Default VM Network :- Edit it, and change VLAN to ALL (4095)

see here

User generated image
User generated image
and then re-try.....
Hi Andrew, all working now :(. But not quite as expected. I was testing as i went along and got to a point where i could ping router and Google DNS IP.
Here's what i have. pic1,  after I reset network editor. Pic2 for network settings for the ESXi vm.

Is this as you would expect because i didn't set the vlan id you suggested?
Thank you
pic1.PNG
pic2.PNG
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Thanks Andrew. I will revisit this and do as suggested but for now will leave as i'm working on something which i need some VMWare VMs. Thank you as always :)
Food for though if using VMware Workstation and nested ESXi, for Labs, is to use AutoLab, which can build ESXi servers unattended under VMware Workstation.

You can see the principle and example here in my EE Article

HOW TO: Set up a lab environment for vSAN using VMware Workstation
Hi Andrew, is vsan free? I was just about to deploy StarWind.
vSAN is not FREE, but the whole idea of AutoLab is you can automatically rebuild your lab every 60 days! using Evaluation Licenses!

and carefully designed, you could use NAS (included with AutoLab to backup to!)

Obviously you would have to backup your VMs, but also possible with eval licenses of all the backup software also downloadeable!