This post will cover the setup of the Hosts networking.  I plan to simulate (as much as possible) a real world deployment, so separating all traffic over different networks.  This will mean adding a few additional Interfaces to each Host and deploying a few Virtual Switches to them also.

The first thing I need to do is add a few Network Interfaces to each of my Hosts, Im going to add 3 Interfaces; 1 for Shared Storage, 1 for FT and 1 for vMotion.

Open up Virtual Machine Settings and select Add…

Select Yes if the User Account Control appears

Select Network Adapter and click Next

As I’m using Internal Networking here within Workstation I have previously created vmnet3 for Storage, vmnet4 for FT and vmnet 5 for vMotion – So in this case I will select Custom and select vmnet3 from the Dropdown – Select Finish

I need to repeat this for all Interfaces and then again for each of my Hosts, so it looks similar to this

Now we have the Network interfaces on the hosts, its time to create some virtual switches and map those interfaces to the Switches.

In vCenter, ensure you are on the Hosts and Clusters Page – If not select the Home Button and select it

There are a few ways to start the Networking config – but for this example, select the Host you want to configure on the left and select the Configure Tab

Select Virtual Switches and click on the add host networking Icon

As we are only adding Storage, vMotion and FT in this Lab – each of the Switches we deploy will contains VMKernel Network Adapters – click Next

Select New standard switch and click Next

We need to add one of the adapters in here, so select the Green Plus icon

Add the relevant Interface – for my lab vmnic1 is for Storage, vmnic2 is for FT and vmnic3 is for vMotion – click OK and then Next

I am going to change the Network label so i know what it is for, so in my case i will call is iSCSI.  I wont be enabling any services here, however for the vMotion and FT Switches I will turn on those features as required.  Click Next

Im going to assign a Static IP here according to how i configured my vmnet networks in Workstations Virtual Network Editor and click Next and Finish

If you select VMKernel Adapters, you can see the Interface, Network Labels, Switch, IP and what Service is assigned

Repeat this for FT and vMotion networks and then ensure they are created on your other hosts.

For FT ensure you enable the Fault Tolerance logging service

And for vMotion, ensure vMotion is selected.  I dint set the TCP/IP stack to vMotion (left as Default) for my Lab environment

When these are all configured, we can see there config via VMKernel adapters

And from Virtual switches, you can click on each Switch and see the layout