I have a cheap but powerful dedicated server I am leasing with OVH, because they were recently having a promotion. I would like to try and manage all this power by playing with VMs using ESXi.
However I am only provided with a single NIC.
I had thought this would be easy to get around since, at home I have a single NIC which is my broadband modem, and yet a simple NAT gateway device happily provides internet access to all my devices.
I am struggling to implement this on ESXi, though. Can anyone advise on how I could go about having ESXi and multiple VMs working with just one NIC?
Here's my current setup:
I believe all I need is to be able to configure NAT from the NIC to all the VMs etc.. How would I set up and administer this kind of infrastructure?
Best Answer
One NIC is very doable, I've done this several times. When you're going through the setup, you give it an IP address for your Management network. Then afterwords when you connect the client to it, you can configure the VMNET to use the same NIC. It'll complain that they really should be separated, but it'll work.
However, you tagged this nat so I'm guessing the actual question here is:
This is a very different problem, since one NIC can have thousands of IP addresses behind it.
This may not be doable with your specific situation, but what you're talking about can be done. You do this by creating another virtual switch with no physical NICS in it.
ESXi 5 host-only test environment
You'd then create a VM that bridges the two vswitches that acts as a NAT-gateway between the two. Your management network would go on the private vswitch, and a port pass-through configured on the NAT gateway to allow you to connect to it.
However, I can see no possible way to set that up without physical access to the machine, so this solution is of limited use.