VLAN creation

Find out how to create VLANs (vRack)

Last updated 18th November 2020

Objective

In a Managed Bare Metal infrastructure, you have a base of 11 VLANs provided with the vRack.

This guide shows how to create additional VLANs

Requirements

  • access to the vSphere Web client (HTML5)

Instructions

Create VLANs

In the Managed Bare Metal solutions, you get two virtual distributed switches (vDS).

These vDS have several different portGroups, each with their own purpose.

The first vDS has a single portGroup type, the VMnetwork being used to communicate to the internet.

The second vDS also has a single portGroup type, with VLANs that can be used to isolate private communications within the Managed Bare Metal interface, and between different OVHcloud services that are vRack-compatible(Dedicated Server, Public Cloud...).

On this switch, 11 VLANs are created as standard (VLAN10 to VLAN20). By giving the administrator right on Access to the V(x)LAN in the users management tab of your Control Panel, you can create additional VLANs.

First, go to your vSphere client's networking view. Deploy the vrack folder then right-click on the dVS ending in -vrack and finally click on New Distributed Port Group.

vRack

New Distributed Port Group

The next step is to name your PortGroup:

nominate portgroup

Then configure the settings recommended by OVHcloud:

  • Port binding: Static (reserving and assigning the port to a virtual machine)
  • Port allocation: Elastic (Allows the number of ports to be hot-wired)
  • Number of ports: 24
  • VLAN type: VLAN (The others are PVLAN and Trunk)
  • VLAN ID: 21 (Knowing that the ID can be configured from 1 to 4096)
  • Check the option Customize default policies configuration.

portgroup configuration

You have 3 security settings that can be activated according to your need:

  • Promiscuous mode: Eliminates any filtering that the VM adapter can perform so that the guest operating system receives all observed traffic on the network.
  • MAC address changes: When set to Accept, ESXi will accept requests to change the effective MAC address to an address other than the initial MAC address.
  • Forged transmits: Affects traffic transmitted from a virtual machine. When set to Accept, ESXi does not compare the source and effective MAC addresses.

The most frequent use of these 3 parameters is the CARP, especially used on pfSense.

security settings

We leave Traffic shaping disabled.

traffic shaping

In terms of load balancing, select Route Based on IP hash, which is the best method for redundancy and load balancing.

Be careful when configuring the failover order: It is necessary to set the lag1 uplink to Active (connection between the virtual network and the physical network), otherwise no communication between the hosts will be possible.

load balancing

The NetFlow is disabled (traffic flow activity report).

netflow

Leave the Block All Ports value at "No".

portgroup finalisation

You will then be presented with a summary of the changes. Click Finish to confirm the creation.

portgroup finalisation

Here we can see that VLAN21 is available and functional.

vlan created

Go further

Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/.


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