How to manually add multiple NICs to the vROps 8.x appliance

Important note: This is officially NOT supported by vROps. I've had a specific one off use case in my lab. It is just a quick workaround and is not recommended in production environment as this solution is not supported by VMware.

 

This article explains how to add multiple network interfaces to a vROps 8.0 and 8.1 appliance. Recently we had a scenario where the vROps appliance needs access to different networks that are isolated/ not routed with the primary network management interface of vROps. In my case, the vROps instance needed access to 3 different networks.

Initially while installing the vROps there will be only one interface (10-eth0.network) and its the default interface for vROps appliance. 

For configuring additional interfaces follow the steps below:

• Add a network card and connect to the respective port group by editing VM settings
• Login to vROps with root creds
• cd /etc/systemd/network/
• Create an entry for the new interface 10-eth1.network (as it will not be present!)
• vi 10-eth1.network
• Provide all necessary IP details and save
  

• Restart network service systemctl restart systemd-networkd
• Verify /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

• Similarly, follow the above steps if you require more interfaces 

Note: This solutions is NOT officially supported by vROps. It is not recommended in production environment.

Related post 

How to manually add multiple NICs to the vROps 7.x appliance

References

https://vmware.github.io/photon/assets/files/html/3.0/photon_admin/managing-the-network-configuration.html

How to manually add multiple NICs to the vROps 7.x appliance

This article explains how to add multiple network interfaces to a vROps 7.0/ 7.5 appliance. Recently we had a scenario where the vROps appliance needs access to different networks which are isolated/ not routed with the primary network management interface of vROps. In my case the vROps instance needed access to 3 different networks.

Initially while installing the vROps there will be only one interface (eth0) and its the default interface for vROps appliance.  

For configuring additional interfaces follow the steps below:

• Add a network card and connect to the respective port group by editing VM settings
• Login to vROps with root creds
• cd /etc/sysconfig/network
• Create an entry for the new interface eth1 (as it will not be present!)
• vi ifcfg-eth1
• Provide all necessary IP details and save

• Reboot the appliance
• Verify details

• Similarly, follow the above steps if you require more interfaces 

Note: I am not sure whether this is officially supported by vROps, but it works! Haven't found any VMware documentations related to this.

Best practice recommendations for iSCSI network adapters

Best practice recommendations for iSCSI network adapters

Note : all those settings are enabled by default, we need to disable it as best practice on all iSCSI NICs

Also, if your network/ network devices supports jumbo frames, then that should be enabled too on the network adapters.

Enabling jumbo frame on Hyper-V 2012 R2 Core NIC using powershell

Enabling jumbo frame on a NIC using powershell is shown below :

Enabling jumbo frames using powershell

To list advanced properties of NIC3 : Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -Name "NIC3"

To change jumbo mtu to 9000 : Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -Name "NIC3" -RegistryKeyword "*jumbopacket" | Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -RegistryValue 9000

Choosing a NIC for your VM in VMware ESXI

If you let VMware to choose a network adapter automatically while creating a VM, it will select a compatible NIC type, but it may not be the one with better performance. Each generation of virtual network adapter has different features and performance levels. Considering ESXI 5 or higher versions, following are the list of network adapters available in order preference best to worst.

-VMXNET 3
-VMXNET 2 (Enhanced)
-E1000

Reference :
VMware