ESXi - connect one VM to another without vswitch?

[Shad]

I want to prototype something that involves connecting machines together directly without using a switch. Can I do that with the networking in ESXi 5.1?

Thanks

 

[Zarf]

You could passthrough a network adapter to each VM and physically connect a crossover cable between them.

Why don't you want to use a VSwitch btw? You could have a private one that only those two VM's were on so it doesn't effect any other traffic.

 

[Shad]

Haven't got enough NICs to try it with passthrough unfortunately. A private switch between two would work but I wanted to prototype a ring network with 3 hosts.

 

[ASE001]

I want to prototype something that involves connecting machines together directly without using a switch. Can I do that with the networking in ESXi 5.1?

Thanks

Not sure what you are asking, but you can connect ESXi to ESXi with a patch cable. If the NIC's are fairly new you won't need a crossover cable it should auto detect and sort it self out. Setup a virtual switch on each ESX server connected to the physical NIC. Effectively setting up trunk network between the servers. From there you can add VLAN's to the virtual switches on each ESX server.

i.e VLAN 10 Production 192.168.1.0/24
VLAN 11 Test 192.168.2.0/24
etc

Each Virtual Machines NIC then can be connected to a VLAN.

 

[tris179]

You can use a internal only vSwitch, ie do not associate any physical nics to that vSwitch and put the vSwitch in Promiscuous mode (acting like a hub??), does that simulate what you want?

Other than that, there is no way of getting a VM to a external NIC withought going through a vSwitch first.