Forum Discussion
Adding Additional NIC to LTM VE
I was hoping that it was possible to hot-add an additional NIC to the appliance since VMware supports that.
Is that not possible or is there something I need to do to get the Web Administrative Console to pickup the additional interface?
- Sorry no such luck on the hot add. If you add interfaces as VMXNET3 they may show up on reboot, to be sure you have to delete /var/db/mcpdb.bin before the reboot.
- Dwimmerlaik_254NimbostratusHow would I go about configuring VLAN trunking? Assume for purposes of discussion that I have 4 different VLANs that I will need to create VIPs on.
Adding an additional layer of complexity, let me explain how our network is configured. The Virtual Host where the Big IP VM resides has multiple physical NICs. These physical NICs are connected to two physical Cisco switches and configured into a single Port Channel (the switches are connected with a stacking cable).
On the VM Host, we have configured a Distributed Switch (dvSwitch) with multiple Port Groups (dvPortGroup). Each of the Port Groups corresponds to a VLAN configured with the appropriate VLAN ID so that network traffic coming out of the Virtual Host is tagged appropriately and the switch then handles the rest.
Where I'm confused is that since each of the three virtual NICs assigned to the Big IP VM is configured for a specific port group, and I have more port groups (with appropriate VLAN ID) than I have virtual NICs, how do I configure the Big IP appliance?
- Sure, you just need to change the VLAN within the vSphere interfaces to be 4095 (which means to vSphere - pass VLAN tags directly through to the VM), then create the VLANs you need within the VE - the names don't have to be consistent with the environment outside the VE but the VLAN numbers/tags must be, and associate those VLANs with the 2 VE interfaces as you require.
- Dwimmerlaik_254NimbostratusHmm, the only problem there is that vSphere doesn't allow you to specify a VLAN ID higher than 4094. I haven't tried creating a VLAN Trunk and then specifying the range of VLAN IDs I'll be using. I'll play around with that and see how that works.
- JRahmAdminSimon is correct. In vSphere the 4095 tag should be used when creating a virtual machine port group. I wrote this up a while back:
- Thanks Jason, that's perfect.
- JRahmAdminThe only place I have seen separation is when the physical uplinks are going into different security zones, for example, a pair of physical NICs connecting into the LAN versus a different pair connecting into a DMZ. In that case, you'd possibly want untagged or separately tagged interfaces to map to the appropriate port group.
- Dwimmerlaik_254NimbostratusOK, here's what I've done. I've created a VLAN Trunk port group in vSphere and told it that the VLAN ID range is 10-21. I've then assigned two of the interfaces on the Big IP VE to that port group. On the Big IP VE, I've created a trunk with those two interfaces and left all settings as default. I've then attempted to create a VLAN with a "tag" of 10 and assign the trunk to the untagged interfaces. When I attempt to do so, I receive the error message "01070734:3: Configuration error: vmw-compat: vlan member type must be an interface".
- Are you using the dVS ? VLAN 4095 is how you configure VLAN trunking on the regular vSwitch.
- Dwimmerlaik_254NimbostratusYes, these are Distributed Virtual Switches.
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