VMware ESXi Networking Class for Home lab - the basics

I find that many are challenged with understanding basic networking when it comes to building their home labs. I use VMware vSphere in my home lab environment. In the video we walk through understanding the basic constructs of VMware vSphere networking, VLANs, the vSphere standard switch, and networking with nested ESXi virtualization.

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Introduction to vSphere networking for home labs - 0:00
Introducting the features of the VMware networking stack - 1:24
How do you do things like tagging VLANS? - 2:00
How do you view the physical layer? - 2:20
Overview of the underlying configuration - 2:31
Describing my nested VMware ESXi environment - 2:50
Looking at the physical network adapters that uplink the ESXi hosts - 3:45
Speed of the network connection and other information - 4:36
Moving on to the default virtual switch and port group - 4:57
Describing vSwitch0 - 5:30
Looking at the management network and VMkernel port - 6:00
Looking at the DCUI to correlate information - 6:25
Looking at the management network in the DCUI - 6:45
Looking at which physical adapters are configured for management access - 7:00
Looking at the IP address configuration in the DCUI - 7:47
Matching up what we see from the DCUI in the vSphere Client - 8:07
Reviewing the overall picture of ESXi networking - 8:19
How do you create VLANs and connecting VMs to VLANs - 9:00
Describing the vSphere port group - 9:23
Looking at the default vSphere port group - VM network - 9:51
No VLAN tag associated with the default VM Network - 10:18
Creating a new port group - 10:37
Assigning a VLAN - 10:54
Assigning a port group to a virtual machine - 11:15
Overview of nested virtualization and networking considerations - 11:46
Describing nested virtualization - 12:43
How to think about nested ESXi networking - 13:30
Talking about tagged VLAN frames - 14:17
The requirements for the physical uplinks tagged with the appropriate VLAN frames - 15:31
Wrapping up the networking basics class for vSphere networking basics - 16:03

My VMware Home lab:

[kamikaze_twist]

As an ex VMware engineer, I would say, for people looking to run this in their homelabs to learn, using it on top of workstation pro(better if its on linux) gives you the added advantage of letting you add multiple nics in bridged mode, which will get assigned a physical IP address directly from your router for each of the individual virtual nics on the workstation layer. You can then run esxi as a VM inside of Workstation and all those nics will appear as physical nics to the ESXi VM letting you take the vmnic count to 8 nics! Great for running VSAN, HA, DRS and as well as lets you use a FreeNas VM as a iSCSI or NFS datastore.! This i found it as a better solution than running ESXi directly baremetal if your homelab does not have a management interface like that of HPE iLO or Dell iDrac.

[marbranchez]

Hello Brando Lee ! I am from Brazil and always see your vídeos about VMware ! I I would like to thank you for your videos. You speak in a very easy to understand way. Through your videos I can learn a lot

[nicholasbatte]

Amazing, simplified tutorial. Many thanks

[grahammccann]

Hi Brandon Lee, Thank you for taking the time to make this video.

[anthonyhenry]

Brandon, thanks very much for your great videos. Your videos are always easy to understand and very informative.

[JosueAlejandroFerret]

The video I needed! A Million thanks!!! Keep them coming, great job!

[JPrez-ioqj]

First, thank you for taking the time to make these videos - extremely helpful. This video seems to have helped me get mostly there but am curious if you have another video around resource allocation/system traffic and network resource pools?

[akopolteseller]

Thank you bro..im noobs in vmware esxi and im a bit confused how this virtual switch is working..and you answer it correctly on this video

[kevinkirk]

Thank you! Just got done upgrading 6.7 to 7.0.3.

[sunnylm]

Thank Brandon, well explaint on vswitch, but i dont quite understand the last bit you saying about "upstream " are you referring to the standard alone physical vmhost?

[jefferytse]

When a server comes with 4 nics (2 1gb and 2 10gb), what's the best practice to use in vmware?

[jgc]

I got confused at the end with the physical uplink, how traffic from virtual gets forwarded to physical. How is that configured? Do you configure the physical nics in trunk mode on both the virtual and physical ESXi nics? And when you build a host VM, you add 2 nics that are based on physical nics?

[fredalstrom]

Great explanation! I'm fairly new to VMware, and have a question. Are the vmnic0, vmnic1, etc. (physical adapters) that are connected to the physical switch trunking by default, or would the interfaces need to be setup as trunk ports?

[rnwtenor]

Brando, I have two 10GB nics on my lab server (single esxi8 box). Currently one is configured for the ESXi8 host on vlan99 (management), which is tagged from the physical switch that the ESXi host is plugged into. I would like to use the second 10gb nic for the lab network, vlan80, which is also tagged from the physical switch. Do I need to add a vSwitch1 to vmnic1 and then add a vmk1 VMkernel adapter? Also, if I wanted to further subdivide the vlant80, it feels like I should be adding a trunking configuration to esxi8, and assigning the vlan tags in esxi. Great video. Thanks,

[imissyy]

Hi Brando, I'm a bit confused that how do you run several ESXi inside a physical vSphere cluster environment mentioned at 12:05.

[kristianjohnramos]

Sir can I create vlan even I don't have switch

[mattboston]

If I wanted to setup vSphere and ESXI in my home lab are there free versions?

[g.s.]

can you make a series of video about GPU on esxi, thanks.

[victornoagbodji]

Are the Management Network and the VM Network port groups too? What didn't they a VLAN ID? 🤔

[mikebarden]

I think one or two diagrams would have helped me more