[IMPORTANT: This method only works with ESX 5.1]
I recently did some very minor updates to the UDA download page here – one thing that I was having trouble with my “template” scripts was enabling “Management Traffic” on the VMware High-Availability portgroups. In case you don’t know or can’t remember its recommended to offer network redundancy to VMware HA to prevent split-brain scenarios occurring. Of course that’s easy to enabled from the GUI:
In the past (about 2-3 years ago I guess) people had to use vim-cmd to set properties like vMotion, FT or Management Traffic on a VMKernel port – if they were doing script kickstart/weasel installations. Anyway, not to be defeated I asked William Lam what my options were. It turns out things have moved along since I did serious scripted installs back in ESX3.x and 4.x days. The ESXCLI command has options turn on these “traffic types” of functionality. In fact William blogged about on vmware.com back in Dec, 2012:
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/12/tagging-vmkernel-traffic-types-using-esxcli-5-1.html
I’m really pleased I asked William about this directly because despite by endless googling this new functionality had slipped under my radar. To be honest it looks like this functionality has been around for sometime – and what was really new was the ability to tag VMKernel ports for vSphere Replication. But as they say, it might be “old” but its “new” to me. 🙂
So for me enable “Management Traffic” on my Standard vSwitch all I need is this line:
esxcli network ip interface tag add -i vmk3 –t Management
I’m in the process of updating my sample templates file to include these new methods – but not before I test them against my own hosts in the lab… meanwhile back at the lab….