Hello everyone! My first post, but I've been lurking and gaining knowledge and practical advice from the forum. The past few days and nights have been dedicated to becoming intimate with VMware ESXi and it's internals and playing with different setups. I'm definitely moving from other virtualization solutions (OpenVZ, Xen) to VMW. That is, as long as we can figure this out! =)
Anyway --
In an attempt to speed-up and dedicate my SAN access, I have created a dedicated "SAN" vSwitch on my ESXi 5.1 server and assigned it a dedicated gigabit NIC with which I have connected a SAN (FreeNAS) server via crossover ("patch") cable. Both ESXi and the FreeNAS server recognize that the link is up. I have assigned this SAN network to several guest VMs running on the ESXi server and all have been assigned IP addresses on the same IP network and subnet as the interface on the FreeNAS server. The ESXi Server and FreeNAS Server are two separate physical machines and FreeNAS server has no virtualizer.
I am unable to transfer network traffic between the VMWare ESXi guests and the FreeNAS server via that crossover connected gigabit ethernet link. I can ping and initiate transfers intra-host from guest to guest that share the SAN vSwitch interface, but NOT to the external machine. I have no tried connecting it through a hub, but in my experience the crossover cable should be just fine and provide the functionality needed for computer-to-computer ethernet connectivity.
I tried adding a VMKernel interface to the SAN network and assigned VMWare an IP on the same subnet but this did not work either.
For reference, I have assigned the following to the "SAN" virtual machine network (vSwitch1, assigned vmnic1). The three guests are able to communicate. They also have connectivity through eth0 to the LAN and the Internet via a local gateway at 10.200.99.1.
- guest1 at IP 10.200.100.5 (eth1, 255.255.255.0 no gw/routing assigned)
- guest2 at IP 10.200.100.6 (eth1, 255.255.255.0 no gw/routing assigned)
- guest3 at IP 10.200.100.7 (eth1, 255.255.255.0 no gw/routing assigned)
I have the following assigned to my FreeNAS:
- IP 10.200.100.1 (interface re1; 255.255.255.0 no gw/routing assigned), with re0 being the LAN interface with a gateway and LAN IP.
As evidenced here, all IPs and subnets are correct, but they do not communcate! Does anyone have any idea how to make this work?
Thanks in advance for your consideration on this matter 
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Brandon Edward