So the title is technically inaccurate. Everything has to traverse a VLAN, and if no VLAN is specified, then you're riding on VLAN 1.
I volunteered to build some Hands On Labs for our technical sales folks and I was in charge of creating the Nexus 1000v Lab. After battling a few quirks for about 7 hours, I was finally able to get everything functioning correctly. The networking piece didn't take 7 hours, but the lab was convoluted enough that I will save you from reading about it.
The lab consisted of running the latest software:
- vCenter 5 Build 455964
- 2x Nested ESXi Servers running 5.0 Build 504890
- Nexus 1000v VSM 4.2(1) SV1(4a)
- Nexus 1000v VEM 201108271-BG
The lab ran on physical ESXi hosts and a network that was completely flat with NO VLANs in use. I know, it's a bad practice, but we're just making due with what we have. The nested environment ran on a single VLAN, but that VLAN was unique, had no actual VLAN properties associated with it, and all VMs had to be running on the same host for communication. It's a complicated setup, but just go with me on this.
When creating a VMkernel Port on an ESXi host, it would be given an IP address in the /24 range, and could be pinged when it was configured with None (0) as the VLAN ID inside of the networking configuration in vSphere.
The tricky part of the networking piece is how does None (0) relate in terms of Nexus 1000v. At first, I thought it would be the same thing as setting the uplink on regular switch on a flat network by making it an access port. After some trial and error I finally nailed down the configuration for the uplink of the physical NICs.
conf t
port-profile type ethernet system-uplink
vmware port-group
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allow vlan all
switchport trunk native vlan 1
system vlan 1
no shutdown
state enabled
end
copy run start
Configuration of the vethernet port groups was pretty simple and straight forward.
conf t
port-profile type vethernet N1KV-VMnetwork
vmware port-group
switchport mode access
vmware max-ports 1024
no shutdown
state enabled
end
copy run start
Hope this helps anyone else out there who is configuring a network the wrong way. :)