Part 7 –  Configure Virtual Switch from VM Essentials Manager 9.1

The cluster has hosts but no networks yet. In 9.1, all the networking features can be done via the UI itself which is actually awesome. In this section we configure the networking from Morpheus manager.

The installer already created vs0 on each host: a Linux bridge on ens18 carrying management (172.16.11.7x, VLAN 1611). Everything else we add here

How it maps to vSphere:

• vs0 is vSwitch0. Its management IP is our vmk0.
• migration gets a host IP per host, .12.71 to .73. That’s the vMotion vmk.
• ISCSI-A and ISCSI-B each get a host IP. Those are the iSCSI vmks
• Production-1619 is our production VM traffic

Go to Cluster → Virtual Switches, the installer already created vs0 on each host

Check the NICs are the same on every host first. The cluster needs identical interface names

for h in 71 72 73; do echo "== 172.16.11.$h"; ssh hvmadmin@172.16.11.$h hvmcli interfaces list --filter ethernet; done

for h in 71 72 73; do echo "== 172.16.11.$h"; ssh hvmadmin@172.16.11.$h hvmcli interfaces list --filter ethernet; done

Live Migration switch

Click + Add on the cluster’s Virtual Switches tab – Choose Live Migration

Select ens20 and ens21 as the uplinks, change Bond Mode to Active Backup and ensure uplink selection is uniform across hosts

Set host IPs manually: hvm-n1 172.16.12.71-73, mask 255.255.255.0, no gateway.

Choose the VLAN as 1612 for our migration vSwitch and MTU as 1500

Review and Click Finish

Let’s do a ping test and we get a ping from our migration network

for h in 72 73; do ping -c2 172.16.12.$h; done

That looks good

iSCSI switches

iSCSI switches take one NIC each because it multipath. Click + Add on the cluster’s Virtual Switches tab – Choose Data (ISCSI)

Choose ens1 as uplink for ISCSI-A

Give VLAN as 1617 and choose the MTU

Click Review and Finish

Repeat the same for ISCSI-B vSwitch

VM network switch

This is where our production VM traffic will go and will pass a series of VLAN trunks- 1919-1950. So add Virtual Switch

Choose Uplinks ens22 and ens23, Active Backup.

Click Review and Finish

So, all our vSwitches ar ready..

Do a quick ping to all our storage interfaces and if our configuration is correct, we should get a valid response

for h in 72 73; do ping -c1 172.16.12.$h; ping -c1 172.16.17.$h; ping -c1 172.16.18.$h; done

Run the hvmcli virtswitch list command to verify all switches created.