VMware Homelab Networking

December 28, 2014 VMware Homelab

I bought a Netgear ProSAFE Plus XS708E 10-Gigabit 8 Port Ethernet Switch for my home lab.  It looked like it was exactly what I wanted, spanning tree prevention, broadcast storm control, Port trunking, Port mirroring, Jumbo Frame Support, LAG and the price is right for a 10 GB network at $823.99.  But the one thing I didn’t notice when I bought it was VLAN routing was not a feature(Layer 2 only).  So I guess I could pack it and ship it back to Amazon or get a layer 3 switch to do the routing and still leverage the 10 GB switch for my hosts Physical uplinks.  I decided with the latter and ordered the Cisco SG 300-20 20-Port Gigabit Managed Switch, it will do my layer 3 routing and it gives me the additional ports that I need due to the 8 port limit on the Netgear switch.

So now I have my 3 hosts, each with 2 physical 10GBE uplinks into the Netgear Switch.  I have 7 VLAN’s defined as followed:

  • vMotion – VLAN2 – 192.168.2.0/24
  • Management – VLAN3 – 192.168.3.0/24
  • iScsi – VLAN4 – 192.168.4.0/24
  • Servers – VLAN5 – 192.168.5.0/24
  • Wireless – VLAN6 – 192.168.6.0/24
  • NFS – VLAN7 – 192.168.7.0/24
  • VSAN – VLAN8 – 192.168.8.0/24

My vMotion, iScsi, NFS and VSAN networks will have no routing enabled to keep those VLAN’s totally isolated.  So I Trunked VLAN3, VLAN5 and VLAN6 from the Netgear 10GB Switch to the Cisco SG 300 and those networks are now routable.

By Jaison Bailley