Adding Networking in Vmware vSphere

Hello and welcome! In this post, I’m going to add a new networking in Vmware vSphere. Networking is one of the most important aspects of any virtual or physical platform and reflecting the real-time requirements of networking in virtual environment is equally challenging. Each virtualization platform has its own approach towards networking and offers its own suite of features and services for that purpose. Here, I’m mainly focusing on Vmware vSphere.

Adding Networking in VMware

First, select the Vmware Host or Cluster in which you need to add a networking. Navigate to Configuration tab and click on Networking under Hardware section. To add new networking, click on Add Networking from the top right corner of the configuration window. An Add Network Wizard comes up.

Choose Virtual Machine as Connection Types and click Next.

Here, we can create a new vSphere standard switch or use an existing switch. Since my server has two NICs and two vSwitches are already created, I’m using an existing switch. If you haven’t got existing switch for use, you can create a new switch for your server’s NIC.

Here, we need to enter the Network Label and VLAN ID to associate this network to. In my case, I’m using Wireless Test as label and VLAN ID as 10.

We can verify the summary and click Finish.

Configuring Switch For VMware

Also, make sure that you’ve configured trunk mode on switchports connecting to your VMware server. In my case, I’ve a Cisco switch and I configured it as follows:

Server-Rack-Switch# conf t
Server-Rack-Switch(config)# vlan 10
Server-Rack-Switch(config-vlan)# name “Wireless Vlan”
Server-Rack-Switch(config-vlan)# exit
Server-Rack-Switch(config)# interface fa24
Server-Rack-Switch(config-int)# switchport mode trunk
Server-Rack-Switch(config-int)# switchport trunk allowed vlan add 10
Server-Rack-Switch(config-int)# description CONNECTS-VMWARE

This setup should allow us to pass VLAN 10 along with native VLAN i.e. VLAN 1 to our Vmware ESXi server.

I hope you found it informative. Please let me know in the below Comments section if you’ve any question or suggestion for me.