Hi all, first time poster.
We have 3 hosts and the vCenter 5.0 app running about 20 virtual servers and all has been well over the last 3 years (had 4.0 before) in our Essentials Plus world. We have always kept each network piece of our VMware puzzle completely seporate until now, meaning the vmkernel management, vmotion, and VM networks have run independantly with no routing accross IP ranges so the vmkernel cannot be accessed by the VM traffic and vice versa (obviously though the hosts can communicate to the vMotion switch). We also do not have an AD domain or internal DNS as we only have 20 servers, only 3 other people in the country have network access, and the need to consolidate into a domain has not come up as an issue (we use host files internally). I tried to upgrade to vCenter appliance 5.1 last week and it had issues due to lack of domain and DNS (VMware support confirmed), despite the fact that the hosts and vCenter are able to resolve by IP and FQDN due to host files. With this issue it seems it is time for us to go to an internal domain and DNS but I'm not sure of the best way for us to establish a way for the hosts and virtual machines to be able to resolve each other since they are on seporate vSwitches, and seporate VLANs on the physical switch they connect to. Here is our setup:
vmkernel management traffic: 192.168.150.x
vmkernel vMotion: 192.168.160.x
virtual machines: 192.168.20.x
What options are there to have the vmkernel 192.168.150.x be able to resolve VM 192.168.20.x addresses? Could I add a vmkernel port to the virtual machine traffic switch and assign a 192.168.20 address to it? Our physical network switch does not have IP routing so I cannot route between the VLANs there unless I bought a physical router but there must be a better way. I'm sure this is elementary to many of you, how do most route traffic to be able to resolve DNS and AD for hosts?
Thank you