Forwarding Mirrored External Switch Traffic

[Brett Sadler]

Hello all,

We need to move our aging VMWare GSX server that runs our 4 Websense servers to our new blade hardware. Websense requires one of the NICs in the server to mirror our internet port from our firewall on our switch to allow web filtering. Our new server I want to use for the new Websense VMs is a BL460c with 2 onboard NICs and a QLogic iSCSI HBA Mezz card running ESXi 4.0 with 8GB RAM.

Currently we have 4 Cisco 3020s in our enclosure. Bay 1 and 2 for LAN traffic and Bay 3 and 4 for our iSCSI SAN Network. Our LAN 3020s each have a 6-port portchannel (trunk) to one of our two HP 2824 Procurve switches and 2 free ports.

Our old server has a physical NIC that plugs into the proper mirrored port on the HP 2824. I need a way to get one of the onboard blade NICs (lets say g0/6) to receive all the mirrored traffic for the Websense VM.

Can I have g0/6 mirror g0/24 which connects to the proper mirrored port on the 2824s? Will the switch block certain traffic? Would it be better to breakdown and get two ethernet pass-thru modules and mezz NIC cards for the ESXi server running the Websense VMs? Does the ethernet pass-thru modules forward ALL traffic without blocking anything?

I would appreciate any help on this matter and I thank you in advance!

Brett Sadler
Network Technician
BETA Healthcare Group
bsadler@betahg.com

[Adrian Clint]

Brett,

This looks more to be a Cisco switch configuration question than a blade question, hopefully someone can answer.

But so you know, the pass-thru is just wires so forwarding/blocking does not apply. It just presents the blade NIC port as 1Gb (fixed) RJ45 on the outside of the enclosure.

[Brett Sadler]

Ok, so the quickest easiest way to get what I want would be the pass-thru modules? Thanks!

[William Fulmer]

I know this is an old thread, but were you able to answer your question?

Facing a similar design challenge here but I think this will work with a dedicated VMware Port Group and then have the Cisco Monitoring Session destination be the VLAN that this dedicated Port Group resides on.