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I am very new to VMware and its setup. Recently, my company purchased a Dell R420 server which has VMware eSXi 5.1 factory installed. It comes with 2 LOM NIC ports at the rear and from the Dell brochure it says:

LOM 1 - VMWare management network LOM 2 - Virtual machine networkx

During the hardware installation on the rack, I was asked which NIC do I want to connect the ethernet cable to. This ethernet cable is connected to a router which provides access to the public internet. Let's call this Router A.

So my guess is to connect the second NIC port (LOM 2) so that my CentOS VMs can have internet access and also be remotely accessed.

And to create/manage the VMs, I am using vSphere Client. For this, I connected the first NIC port (LOM 1) to Router A as well. I then connected my laptop with vSphere to Router A and was able to access VMware eSXi.

Now the questions are:

  1. Can I still manage the VMware eSXi remotely if only LOM 2 is connected to Router A?
  2. Is it ok if I plug in both LOM 1 and LOM 2 to Router A?
  3. How can I just use one LOM or NIC port and still be able to access VMware eSXi and also the CentOS VMs? If yes, how should I set the management network IPs inside eSXi vs the CentOS VMs?

Appreciate any suggestions :)

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    So much wrong so little time. I'd google this a bit more prior to asking these questions here. You pretty much need to have a clue as to what you are doing or this place will tear you a new one.
    – tony roth
    Jul 9, 2013 at 15:24
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    Just to reinforce tony's comment - try to learn/test on your own some first. ServerFault is not a "Teach me the basics of vSphere" kind of place. And yes, you are asking about the basics..
    – Rex
    Jul 9, 2013 at 15:56

1 Answer 1

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You can find everything you're asking in the VMware documentation you are supposed to read before asking. I'll give you some quick facts here:

  1. not with the current configuration
  2. yes, if network is configured correctly (both hypervisor & router A)
  3. you have to reconfigure the VMware vSphere Hypervisor network configuration and put both the management interface and the VM's interfaces on a single vSwitch connected to the physical port you want to use

This will answer your immediate question; I'll leave the details and the reasonings as an exercise to the reader :)

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