3. VXLAN Configuration

You don’t really need to use VXLANs for your vCloud Director infrastructure. In fact, there are some requirements on your physical stack which needs to be considered.

When creating your first Provider vDC. It will try to create a VXLAN backed network pool by default and unless correctly configured, it will complain about it. And I don’t like errors 🙂

Again, you don’t have to use it, you could just create a different pool, but here I am configuring VXLAN just so you know how, and to complete my set of documentations

More about VXLANs can be found HERE.

Let’s get started.

If not already – change your view in vShield Manager to Hosts & Clusters.

Then click your Datacenter > Network Virtualization > Preparation > Connectivity

Here click Edit

Select the cluster, the dVS and give it a VLAN (which needs to exist also on your physical switches)

Select the Teaming Policy and click Finish

Note: You may need to have a chat with your network guys about this. Unless you got Channel Groups / Port Channels / Ether Channels on your physical layer underneath, choose Failover.

This is what I am using in my lab – plus there isn’t any physical infrastructure underneath because the cluster in question is nested / virtual.

Also, IF you got a virtual cluster as well and IF you installed the VMware tools for nested ESXi hosts, you will need to remove VMWare Tools first as the VXLAN agents will fail to install.

This will now create additional VMkernel interfaces on each host. As this is just a lab, I don’t mind leaving it on DHCP