From the course: VMware vSphere 8 Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV) (2V0-21.23) Cert Prep

vCenter multi-homing - vSphere Tutorial

From the course: VMware vSphere 8 Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV) (2V0-21.23) Cert Prep

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vCenter multi-homing

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- [Rick] In this video, I'll introduce you to vCenter multihoming. This feature was introduced in vSphere 7, and this is an important feature if you plan to follow along in your own home lab, and it's especially important if you plan to complete some tasks like, for example, Lifecycle Manager. What I'm going to do is I'm going to set up multiple network interfaces on my vCenter server, and I've done this in my home lab to enable internet access for my vCenter server at home. And with multihoming, this gives you the ability to configure multiple virtual network interfaces on your vCenter Server Appliance virtual machine. This is used to give you the ability to make your vCenter Server Appliance available on multiple networks without having to route that traffic. And you can configure a maximum of four vNICs on the vCenter Server Appliance. NIC 0 is always going to be there by default. That's the primary management interface for vCenter, and so that one's always going to be there. When you create a second virtual NIC for the vCenter Server Appliance, that's going to be reserved for vCenter High Availability. So when you enable VCHA, or vCenter High Availability, it uses this interface to essentially communicate with the standby vCenter instance. So that's NIC 1. And NIC 2 and NIC 3 can be used for multihoming. So the way we'll go about this is to actually edit the settings on the vCenter Server Appliance virtual machine to add those virtual NICs. And so here we see a little diagram just kind of breaking this down. We've got our vCenter Server Appliance with multiple virtual NICs, and there's a few use cases identified here. NIC 0, that's our management virtual NIC. NIC 1 is for vCenter High Availability. NIC 2, maybe I've got a specific network that I want to push my backups towards. NIC 3, maybe I've got a third party that I'm allowing to communicate with this vCenter Server Appliance, and I'm exposing that one network interface to them, NIC 3. So the ability to create multiple interfaces with multiple IP addresses is supported in vCenter 7 with a feature called multihoming. So now let's take a look at a demo of how to configure multihoming on the vCenter Server Appliance. This demo was actually recorded on vSphere 7, but the process has not changed at all for vSphere 8, so you should be able to follow along with the demo no problem. So here you can see I've already logged in to the vSphere client, and here is my vCenter Server Appliance virtual machine. So I'm going to right click this. And for multihoming, what we're looking to is add multiple network interfaces. So at the moment, you can see we've only got one NIC associated with this vCenter Server Appliance. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Add New Device. I'm going to add another network adapter, and I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. And now let's move over to the VAMI and examine what the configuration looks like in there. So you can see prior to this, before I refresh, I only had NIC 0. Let me refresh my VAMI screen here. Now you can see I have NIC 0 and NIC 1, which was automatically reserved for vCenter High Availability. So let's go back to the vSphere client. I'm going to edit settings on this VM again, and I'm going to add two more network adapters. So let's go to Add New Device. We're going to add a network adapter here. Let's go ahead and add one more device, another network adapter. And I'll go ahead and hit OK here and go back to the VAMI, and I'll refresh the VAMI again. And now we can see we should have NIC 2 and NIC 3 available. And I can go to any of those network interface cards now, I can edit them, and I could assign different IP addresses on each of these network interface cards. So for example, I could go to NIC 3, and maybe this is going to be on a specific network for backups. So maybe I might have a different DNS server there or a different IP address. Is it going to be automatically obtained or am I going to manually specify that IP address? So now my vCenter Server Appliance is actually equipped with four network interfaces. And just to wrap this process up, I'm going to go back to the vSphere Client, and I'm going to edit settings on this VM one more time. And I'm just going to clean up after myself. I'm going to remove the three network adapters that I just added to vCenter, and clean up those changes that I made so that we'll be back to a single virtual NIC. And we just refresh the VAMI one more time, and we're back down to a single network interface card. So that's how you can configure multihoming on the vCenter Server Appliance in vSphere 7.

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