Create standard port-group for trunking all VLANs to VM

Home > VMWare platform > VMWare vSphere or ESXi > Create standard port-group for trunking all VLANs to VM

Typically we only allow one VLAN in a standard (or even distributed) portgroup. This way each portgroup gets traffic of only one tagged or untagged VLAN from the external network and connects it to appropriate VM NIC. If there is a requirement for a VM to access more than one VLAN, we can add multiple NICs to the VM in each of the different portgroups.

However, if there is requirement to trunk multiple VLAN traffic to a VM, then we need to do the following:

1. Create a new portgroup with VLAN ID as 4095 (All VLANs) with suitable name (Eg All VLANs Trunk)
2. Then change VM NIC to belong to this new portgroup.

After this all the VLANs that are avaiable at uplink ports of this particular switch should be available to the VM also. Then use appropriate OS networking features to make use of these multiple VLANs available at same NIC.

This can be very useful if you want to setup nested virtualization for installing KVM or even ESXi inside the VM and transfer multiple VLANs to it for lab experiments.

Refer:

• https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VI-VMware-ESX-3-5-Discussions/Assigning-multiple-VLANs-to-a-single-Port-Group/td-p/2450415

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