I have just begun planning and building a lab for my ESXi / vSphere environment so that I can do a upgrade of our vSphere environment (more to come on this process), but I got stuck with an issue for NFS storage. The issue was that I could not mount the datastores on the nested ESXi host, I was not able to find any clear information quickly on the web, so I decided to do a “settings” process here.
A brief background of the environment:
- Networking: Cisco 3850, with Trunk VLAN configured.
- Storage: NetApp cDOT with NFS volumes
- ESXi Version: 6.0U3
The important changes are in bold below and the reasoning is VERY well outlined in this “ancient”, yet 100% valid post by William Lam: Why is Promiscuous Mode Forged?
Physical Host Config:
vSwitch:
- Jumbo Frames: 9000
- Virtual Machine Port Group:
- Name: All Tagged VLANs – Storage
- VLAN ID: All (4095) (this will allow me to use ALL the VLANs presented by the cisco switch ports)
- Jumbo Frames: 9000
- Network Security:
- Promiscuous Mode: Accept
- MAC Address Changes: Reject
- Forged Transmits: Accept
Virtual Host Config:
vSwitch:
- Jumbo Frames: 9000
- VMKernal Port:
- Name: NFS – VLAN 212
- VLAN ID: 212
- Jumbo Frames: 9000
EDIT: Turns out this is needed on all physical host vswitches ports (vmkernal and vm port groups) to have all networking functioning on a nested host.