Essentially I have two physical servers (Both identical, both ESXi hosts, each with 2xdual gbit nics) in a private rack in a data center. They will both be running a variety of db/web/storage server guests and each has a large redundant storage array for backing up the other's vm's for redundancy. Each machine has two uplinks (one from each NIC) to the datacenter's switch and the remaining two (again, one from each NIC) connecting them together directly, without a switch, for 3 reasons: data transport security between machines, independence from the datacenter network equipment and speed.
My question is this: How can I configure these hosts so that a guest web server on ESXi host 1 to connect to the DB server on ESXi host 2 over their private connection? Specifically what needs to be configured on the ESXi servers in order to add a new virtual NIC and assign a private IP address for internal communication with other guests.
If you need any additional detail I will be monitoring the thread closely to make updates.
Thank you!