ok vmware people need you to answer a question

[intertan]

ok so the computer nerd in my friend and I were thinking. I got him into using vmware player for trying out linux.

 

we got the following setup

main machine

some new sandy bridge motherboard with a good cpu/ram combination

the board has 4 pcie slots so we put 4 pcie network cards in 10/100 total 5 (4 pcie+1 onboard)

windows 7 64 bit due to the ram

 

virtual os

4 windows 7 starter edition, about as low as you can get

 

misc

5 separate networks/isp so 5 different ip addresses

 

I hope you know were I am going

 

so is it possible to assign 1 ethernet port to 1 vm

ie

windows #1 onboard lan (main os which holds vmware workstation

windows #2 pcie network adapter #1  (vm image #1)

windows #3 pcie network adapter #2  (vm image #2)

and so on 2 more times?

 

I am just wondering if these network adapters may conflict with one another.

 

[Zuhkov]

With vmware player/workstation? I don't know. With ESXi, absolutely yes with one caveat.

 

In ESXi, you can setup as many virtual switches as you want and assign any combinations of NICs and VMs to each. In this scenario, you'd have five different virtual switches, with one Windows VM and one NIC assigned to each. The caveat is that the hypervisor itself also has to be assigned to one of your virtual switches, so one switch will be shared between a Windows VM and the hypervisor. I wouldn't really see that as a big problem, though.

 

You also have the option of doing hardware passthrough, though that can be a little more complicated.

 

One other thing to keep in mind, you can get cheap PCI-X NICs on eBay that work great in PCI slots, if you're looking to really max out your board.

[intertan]

I thought about esxi after posting this.

I am also thinking that since I may build a 2nd unraid box soon I may use that hardware to play with esxi

 

[revco]

With the info you presented, I would probably suggest scrapping the four 10/100 NIC's for a single gigabit adapter.  You're going to get comparable performance to the four NIC's with a lot less complication.  Also, Zuhkov is correct that ESXi would be required to do this since you need access to VSphere to modify the network parameters and to create virtual switches and such.

 

Depending on what you have on the network side, I've found it's a lot better to aggregate multiple NIC's into a port channel (or LACP group) such that the VM instances can utilize aggregated bandwidth of multiple NIC's.  You would require a managed switch that can do LACP trunks, however.  That way, you can aggregate even more out of any given server, if need be.

[WeeboTech]

Seems like a project I had to do years ago.

 

That project was a network of ftp servers on customer networks, consolidated to one proxy server to access a single remote ftp server.

 

The networks HAD to be totally 100% separate.

 

I used an Intel PCI 10/100 card that had 2 network ports on it for a total of 4 cards, 8 ports, 2 machines.

 

I only mentioned this because it seems like there's a desire to keep the wires totally isolated so there is no possibility of cross traffic contamination.  That was our requirement years ago.

[intertan]

we were just curious that if you had local access to x number of separate networks could you use 1 pc instead of 1 pc/network