Virtual Switches, trunk ports and IP Hosts

[SommyJo]

To transfer VLANs to VMs I followed various online guides; so on a Win11 Host PC I created Virtual Switches and Virtual Adapters in Hyper-V.

Now I have, in chain:

1. OPNSense Firewall with VLAN 10, 20 and 30
2. Netgear switch with a trunk port to Win11 PC (VLAN 10, 20 and 30)
3. vSwitch on Win11 with 3 vAdapters associated with 10, 20 and 30.
4. in Workstation 17.5 there are 3 VMs with a vNIC that I would like to associate with the 3 VLANs.

Now my problems are two.
1) If I keep the trunk type port on the switch, the WIN11 PC takes the IP from the DHCP of one of the VLANs on the firewall (for example 30) while I want it to always take the IP from a specific VLAN, for example 10.
To always have 10 I have to change the port from trunk to access, but by doing so I couldn't transfer the other two VLANs to the virtual machine.

I could use a static IP on this and other PCs, but a laptop is used everywhere and I would have to change the settings every time. For this I would prefer (if possible) DHCP.

2) The second problem (actually it's more of a doubt) is whether the vAdapters should be configured as access type or trunk type.

Has anyone already found themselves in this situation? How did he solve it?

[ThompsG]

Hi SommyJo,

Sorry if I have misunderstood but in order for your situation to work, you need to have the Win11 PC VLAN tagged otherwise its doesn't know which VLAN it is meant to be associated with and therefore it will default to the Native VLAN given it is untagged traffic.

So just to confirm - are you VLAN tagging on the Win11 PC (for argument's sake let's call this HostA) for the network adapter (physical) which is connected to NetGear switch port configured as a trunk?

Kind regards.

[SommyJo]

The switch has two ports with the trunk. One coming from the firewall and one towards the HOST NIC.
On this NIC I can't find a way to configure the VLAN and Intel no longer provides tools to manage VLANs on NICs.
I had trouble configuring Hyper-V because all the vNetAdapters were disabled.
I have now removed them all and am trying to do a fresh install.

However, I find it absurd that you have to use Hyper-V to configure a VMWare service, with all that entails starting from the increase in resources used on the host.

[ThompsG]

Hi there,

Unfortunately, when working with desktop virtualization then enterprise features like VLAN tagging are a nice to have. However, there are ways to work around them. One as you have mentioned is to use vSwitches from Hyper-V to create virtual interfaces which are VLAN tagging. Then you associate these with Networks in VMware Workstation as you mentioned. I actually think this is the most elegant solution and I'm suspecting there is not much overhead to just using this function.

If you would still like to travel another path, then the latest Intel drivers (via PROSet) again supports VLAN tagging: Intel® Ethernet Adapter Complete Driver Pack

Once you have downloaded this and installed, then you can create VLANs for the interface via PROSet utility:

These seem to work like Hyper-V adapters in that you get new interfaces in your host machine as follows (NOTE: This is just an example, and you would create the three VLANs you require):

Then you associate these with Networks in VMware Workstation and then VMs but I think you get the idea here 🙂

WARNING: I haven't actually tried to get anything to 'talk' through my VLAN10 adapter as I'm running my port as an access port. If I get a chance, I will have a go.

Hope this helps and kind regards.

[SommyJo]

Intel does not support Win11, at least my cards.
It only recognizes one NIC, but doesn't add anything for configuring the VLANs.
The only way is to use Hyper-V, but I still find it unintelligent to use the features of the direct competitor and without even minimal documentation on what should be done.
I need to learn how to use Hyper-V after years of only using VMWare.
OK. I'll get over it.
Thank you all the same.