On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 11:33 -0400, Gordon McLellan wrote:
Does anyone have VLAN tagging working from within a guest on vmware-server? I'm running a centos 4.5 guest on a centos 5 host with vmware server 1.04 and I've tried creating vlans using both the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts method and just doing it from the cli via vconfig. Either way appears to work, the OS creates the vlans, but I think vmware's network adapter must be eating the tags or something, since the guest is not able to talk to the real vlan on the switch.
On the host I setup vmnet3 to be bridged to eth1. I bring eth1 up on the host but don't configure it in anyway. Vmnet3 is configured as eth1 on the guest as well. If I create vlans on eth1 on the host, it is able to talk to corresponding vlans on the switch.
I'm wondering if there's some trick to get it work or some configuration string needed in the vmx file? Right now I have the vlans setup on the host and then bridged to vmnetX adapters for the guests. But this is kind of messy since I have to take all my virtual machines down to change anything.
I agree ... i've done exactly the same thing : creating the ethx.vlan# interfaces on the host and it works this way. I've not tested the reverse : creating the vlan interfaces in guests : to be honnest, i didn't want to configure the 802.1q virtual adapters in each virtual machines guests ... so i did it directly on the Host and bridged each vmnet network to a specific ethx.vlan# interface. But i agree that if you need to bridge another vlan , you have to run vmware-config.pl, which will take all the virtual machines down ... Unfortunately, i can not test what you're trying to do today, but as soon as i have acces to the infrastructure, i'll do it and keep you informed ... Not really directly related (to 802.1q i mean) but i had strange behaviors on several nics (old broadcom nics in ibm bladecenter) .. have you tried a firmware upgrade on your nics ? that did the job for me ..
I've asked on the vmware forum if that was possible to modify vmnet config in a 'hot way' but it seems not possible. Btw , i've also asked this on the vmware forum, but their answer is that such setup is too complex for vmware-server (that was not designed to work with vlans) and of course they point you to esx (aka virtual infrastructure ... ) ... But i was answered also that vmware server 2.0 should be released in a short time ... and that we can expect some newer things ... i hope vmnet configuration in real-time ...