Home / server / Questions / 227293
Accepted
Chris Phillips
Asked: 2011-01-27 10:58:44 +0800 CST

ESX vSwitches and natting multiple identical private subnets to the outside

  • 772

Is it possible to use vSwitches on ESX 4 to allow multiple identical private subnets to be natted out to an external subnet?

I'm used to the logic of natting a single private subnet out to a routable subnet on a physical network, but can I configure something to take, say 5 port groups, all in their own vSwitches and all using the same /24 subnet and end up with all appropriate outbound traffic from ALL of these subnets down to a single IP representative of the physical ESX machine they are coming from?

I'd assume that as a NAT is occurring there is a suitable managed state table, meaning that a response packet from a physical remote machine will be put back on the right originating subnet even though that IP might exist on 4 other VM subnets.

Thanks

Chris

vlan nat vmware-esx subnet

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Not inherently no, vSwitches are just that switches - purely layer 2 devices, obviously NAT is, in general terms, an IP-specific function.

    As for your second paragraph, yes you can great multiple port groups on the same vlan and create vNICs in a single VM for each one, within that VM (depending on your OS of course) you could team them together to a single IP but that's more to do with the OS config really.

    Feel free to clarify your question if I've misunderstood so far.

    • 0