Demo: Verify VM network configuration in vSphere 6.7 - vSphere Tutorial

- [Rick] In this video, I'll demonstrate how to verify the network configuration for a virtual machine in vSphere 6.7, and I'll be using the free hands on labs that are available at hol.vmware.com. So let's choose one of these virtual machines here and take an in depth look at the networking configuration for the VM. I'm going to choose this virtual machine called challenge-04a, and I'm just going to right-click the virtual machine and go to Edit Settings. And we're going to start out by looking at the virtual NIC, or VNIC that's been configured for this virtual machine. So here we see network adapter 1. Now the first setting that we want to take a look at is which port group is this virtual NIC connected to. Basically, this is the virtual equivalent of which switch am I plugged into? Which port on a switch am I plugged into? All of these port groups can have different security settings, they can have different VLAN assignments. So I have to make sure that my virtual machine is plugged into a port group that's going to allow that VM to communicate on the network. So I can change the port group that it's connected to right here. I can also check or uncheck the connected option. So if I want to basically do the virtual equivalent of unplugging my machine from the network, I'll just uncheck this box. Checking it is like plugging it back into the network. And then a few other relatively simple settings here. Do I want to automatically connect this virtual machine to the network at power on or not? So I'm going to leave this checked and every time my VM powers on, it'll be automatically connected to the network. There are potentially also different network adapter types that I can choose from here. And you can see here the type of adapter that's been selected is a VMXNET 3. So, let's explore that a little bit more deeply. What I'm going to do is add a new device here. I'm actually going to add another network adapter. And as we're adding a second network adapter to this virtual machine, again I'll choose the virtual switch and the port group that it should connect to. But what I really want to show you here is the different network adapters that are available. So in most use cases, the recommended network adapter is the VMXNET 3. That's the most efficient adapter type that incurs the least amount of CPU overhead on the ESXI host. So VMXNET 3 is included with VMware Tools. There's a driver in VMware Tools that is there for the VMXNET 3, a virtual NIC, and in most cases, this is the type of adapter you should choose. You could choose single root IO virtualization passthrough as the adapter type as well, or SR-IOV. With SR-IOV, what you're essentially doing is you're connecting this virtual machine directly to a physical network interface. And basically bypassing the virtual switch completely. So, with SR-IOV, this is a good use case for virtual machines that need extremely low network latency. But most virtual machines don't require this. Now one final thing I will say about SR-IOV before we move on, you are binding this virtual NIC to a specific physical port. When you do that, it makes things like VMotion impossible, because you're bonding this VM to a specific piece of hardware on this particular ESXI host. So just bear that in mind. But yeah, in most cases, we'll go with VMXNET 3. Now I'm going to cancel the addition of this new device here. So I'm just going to hit cancel here. That's the basic network configuration, and the things that you would want to verify on an individual virtual machine. So let's go back to this VM one more time. I'm going to right-click it and go to Edit Settings, and a couple final things I just want to demonstrate here. So like I showed you before, we can add multiple network interfaces to an individual virtual machine. So now you can see I have three network adapters, each of which are connected, each of which are associated with a port group. I'll go ahead and hit Okay there. And yeah, I can have multiple network interfaces on an individual virtual machine. As a matter of fact, I can even add network interfaces when this VM is powered on. So I just powered on my VM, I'm going to go to Edit Settings. I can modify network adapters, even when the VM is powered on. So for example, here we see network adapter 3. If I kind of hover over it towards the right here, I can hit a little X button. That should remove that network adapter, even though the VM is powered on. So as long as my operating system can handle it, I can go ahead and add and remove network interfaces while the VM is powered on. I'll go ahead and add one while the VM is powered on. I'll add a new network adapter, I'll pick the port group to connect it to, I'll pick the adapter type, maybe I'll choose VMXNET 3 here, and go ahead and hit Okay. And now we can see under the summary screen for the VM, it's got three network interfaces, all of which are connected. So you can modify the number of virtual NICs on the fly, even on a virtual machine that's already powered on.