I have someone requesting a separate physical connection to an ESXi 5.5 hosts for a specific application using a separate subnet. We are going to use vmnic0 which is currently free. I have created vSwitch2 and added vmnic0. (Our current setup has vSwitch0 with vmk0 for VM traffic and vSwitch1 with vmk1 for vMotion traffic.)
I am under the impression I need 2 IP's from the requestor. One for the VM and one for the uplink NIC (vmnic0) in that same subnet. Can uplink ports work without a vmkernel port defined? Defining a VMkernel port is the only way to config an IP address on a NIC. If the physical adapter doesn't have an IP address, how would it pass any traffic?
In searching for details, I see that the vSphere Networking Documentation doesn't actually detail needing to add a VMkernel port to a vSwitch. I am not seeing how that could possibly work and still communicate outside of the ESX host. Am I missing something obvious?
Thx,