VMM 2012 Self Service Users and VLAN tagging

scvmm

I have a Production network in VMM 2012 that has a trunk from the managed ProCurve switch (running VLANs) to the guest VM nic. The connection from switch to Hyper-V guest network is a trunk carrying VLANs 69 and 200. I initially created the Fabric Logical Network as below.

sites

Viewing the same machine as a self service user, I am unable to select the VLAN and can only select the adapter. I understand self service users cannot set VLANs.

So I instead went back and created the VLANs under the same network site:

new site

I then added a new VM Network. Below is a screenshot of the Data subnet being added, i repeated for Server and Voice subnets so each had their own VM network:

site

Then when adding a new VM as a guest, I see the site is in the drop down list (one and only one site is listed here, in this case Data_0). Selecting this automatically ticks the VLAN with the correct ID:

new vm

With the above, i would need to add a separate VM Network for each site. Whilst this extra work isn't a problem, I need to check:

  1. Is this is the correct way of doing things (adding one VM network per network subnet)?

  2. For the VM Guest hardware NIC properties, why is there a drop down list for the VM Subnet when I can only add one site to a VM network anyway?

  3. For the VM Subnet properties of the VM Network, is it normal to not be able to add more than one VM subnet to a VM Network?

Best Answer

One thing to check is scope: the user role, logical network definitions, host groups etc all need to match up on scope so they all come together. When it comes to VLANs, my understanding of logical network definitions is that these are meant to allow users to pick something with a friendly name and not have to understand the VLANs that exist underneath--so you should strive to hide the VLANs from the user and just have them select a network that logically makes sense for the purpose.

Have you had a chance to review these two resources on TechNet? Pretty comprehensive, though tough to wrap the brain around:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj721568.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj983727.aspx

Hope that helps.