Re: [Bridge] Bridging vSwitches in VMwares ESXi

[Robert LeBlanc <robert@leblancnet.us>]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Ryan Whelan <ryan.whelan@tbamerica.com> wrote:
> oh good- glad to find out im not crazy. we do have 2 pNICs in the external
> facing vSwitch.  Even when setting them as active/passive, its still an
> issue.
>
> so its a confirmed issue with vmware- do they have any intention on
> correcting it? do we know?
>

Yes as long as the pNIC is attached, even if in standby mode it causes
a problem.

It is an issue, but they won't fix it for two reasons. 1. They will
never create a bridge between two vSwitches/VLANs, and 2. a fix would
introduce more overhead and reduce flexibility and since they adhere
to #1, it doesn't make sense. The flexibility they lose is multiple
pNICs to one or more switches without having to have any trunking
protocols.

You can get around the problem by buying the Cisco Nexus virtual
switch, it's a real layer 3 switch, but it's a pricy option.

If you want a bridge in a VM, then only pNIC per switch (no
redundancy). The other option, try to make the bridge a router
instead. For us we wanted a transparent firewall, so it was easy to
change the configuration to proxyarp for a transparent router instead.

Robert LeBlanc
Life Sciences & Undergraduate Education Computer Support
Brigham Young University