How To Create Virtual Switch In Vmware Workstation

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I have several physical routers and switches in my home lab and I am trying to connect one to my esxi server that's running in workstation on my pc.

A usb nic is connected to my pc and various virtual switches and routers are created in my esxi server.

Essentially I am deploying deploying cucm on my esxi server and I have physical phone connected to physical switches and I want to be able to reach the phones via the physical switch.

I am by no means a vm guy so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off?

88% of IT pros got this right.

6 Replies

The fact you are nesting making things more difficult because your virtual switch on WS also needs to be able to pass the traffic for ESXi.

Have you set the correct VLANs/Trunks on the switches, both physical and virtual?

What is your exact problem? You just connect the nic to a physical LAN. in vmware workstation choose the type of network 'Bridged' so that the physical network can be reached. In esxi you can create virtual networks but only the main native one that esxi is connected to will reach the physical net at layer 2.

I would advise not trying to use VLANs etc from Physical to Virtual - this would need the PC OS to allow them and vmware workstation to pass them through.

Just use esxi directly on bare metal if you want to have a complex virtual/physical network.

this is why it's confusing, some info is saying to create vlans and some says not to but anyway the the physical switchport interface is configured trunk, tagging vlan 10

I bridged the physical NIC that's plugged into my desktop to a VMnet adapter and configured it as a trunk port (stated above)

So far on the ESXi I have created a port group that's connected to physical adapter umic1 that is defaulted to vlan 0 (should I change the vlan to 10 or is this where I change the physical adapter?), that PG is also connected to a virtual switch I created.

This is where I fell off a cliff, not sure exactly where to go from here......

This stuff is easier to configure in gns3 but these days the only vm I can get gns3 to is the gns3-vm

If you have a flat network you dont need VLANS or any configuration on the vSwitch, if you have VLANs it's easiest to simply trunk the physical switch port and also enable trunk on the vSwitch, specific VLANs can be configured within the virtual network if you wish.

As I noted, you're running nested hypervisors, so you may need to also look at the workstation nic settings, or more specifically, trunk the port your physical PC is on.

I don't think vmware workstation supports vlan tags itself.

You can add tagged vlans to the host OS (e.g. windows using nic specific application) and then map each vlan to a different virtual network using the vmware workstation network editor. But just don't. there was post on here recently from someone who every time windows updated all the vlans were lost etc.

just put all the vms in one big network for your poc or lab. Or use esxi on physical host.