Port trunk and VLAN - trying to understand

[xcom]

Hi, I have just bought a 2510G-24 switch, which I have connected to 2 ESXi servers.

I have one VLAN for VMotion and I have setup 2 seperate trunks on the switch, each with 2 ports for each ESXi hosts and failover works perfectly. The ports for the trunks are simply untagged ports for the VMotion VLAN.

Now my next challenge is to transport multiple VLAN over a trunk. As I am reading the documentation, you can only have one VLAN if you use a trunk on the HP switch? Or am I mistaking?

My plan was to setup 1 trunk with 4 ports, 2 ports for each hosts that will transport multiple server VLAN's (for VM's) and then use VLAN tagging inside the virtual switch on the ESXi hosts, but now I am a little bit confused if this would work. I would like to use trunks so that I have redunancy for the VM network, but if I can't use more than 1 VLAN for each trunk, I guess I have have to go back to use only a single port for each ESXi host.

Or am I mistaking here?

[Tim Upham · Accepted solution]

You can assign multiple VLANs to a trunk.  If you use the Menu you should be able to go Switch Configuration > VLAN Menu > VLAN Port Assignment, select Edit, and scroll to your trunks which are probably called  Trk1 and Trk2 in the Port Column.  If you see the trunk ports listed individualy instead of by the trunk name you don't have the ports trunked.

[paulgear]

To set that up you need to create a trunk port on the switch as lobster mentioned, then you can add as many VLANs as you like to that trunk.  Normally, one VLAN (often VLAN 1, the default VLAN) is left untagged, and the other VLANs are tagged.

Then you create a port group inside your vSwitch which specifies the VLAN to be used.  If you want to isolate VMs from one another then you can put them on port groups which map to different VLANs untagged, or if you want to use a VM as a firewall/router, you can put in a VTG (virtual trunk group) using VLAN 4095.

Check out the document http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf for more details on how to set up the VMware side.  The important thing on the ProCurve side is to tag the appropriate VLANs on the trunk.

[xcom]

Thanks! Stupid of me not to check the whole screen.... :)