Create an virtual network interface in an ESX windows guest using VGT (Virtual Guest Tagging)
Get the intel drivers from e1000 NIC (32bit) and install them in your vm. Once installed make sure you configure the network card properties with the correct VLAN tag. Then make sure that you assign the VLAN tag 4095 to the virtual machine’s portgroup.
Vyatta interfaces change when converted/migrated in a virtual environment
The virtual appliance you can download already has the correct udev rules which usually cause this situation (see here). There is a file in vyatta which has a record of the specific interface information. When you migrate the machine, this record causes the machine to think the adapters have changed. Edit the following file:
nano /opt/vyatta/etc/config/config.boot You can either remove the interfaces section or edit the interfaces to suit i.e. change the MAC addresses etc.
Changing the VLAN Tag for an Existing ESX Service Console
Once you have made network changes (802.1Q) and you have lost (oops) connectivity to your service console, use the following to change the VLAN tag:
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -v N -p Service Console Where N is the VLAN tag you want to use. In this case it was vSwitch with the portgroup name Service Console. To list the current configuration use:
esxcfg-vswitch -l
Adding a Port Group and Setting the VLAN tag from the Service Console in ESX
Use the following:
esxcfg-vswitch -A "Port Group Name" vSwitch2 && esxcfg-vswitch -v N -p "Port Group Name" vSwitch2 Where N is the VLAN tag.
Thin Provisioning Disks in ESX
Log in over SSH and run:
vmkfstools -c 50G -d thick /vmfs/volumes/san/vm/thick.vmdk vmkfstools -c 50G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/san/vm/thin.vmdk A ls will show:
50G thick-flat.vmdk 373 thick.vmdk 50G thin-flat.vmdk 398 thin.vmdk However a du will show:
50G thick-flat.vmdk 64K thick.vmdk 1.0M thin-flat.vmdk 64K thin.vmdk Which is, I think, rather neat…
Sniffing Network Traffic in ESX
If you want to enable promiscuous network sniffing within a vSwitch the safest way to do it is to create a second port group. Promiscuous mode can be enabled on an existing port group but once this has been done, any device connected to that port group has that ability.
Once you have your second port group correctly configured you can attach a monitoring appliance. To do my monitoring I tend to use OpenBSD with tcpdump and then use Wireshark to analyse the data.