Saturday, March 19, 2016

Netgear VLAN & PVID making me doubt my sanity

Rebuilding my home lab tonight, I got stuck because every time I plugged a cable into my switch, everything died.



I came to realize that the reason for my problems was the fact I had been moving cables around in my Netgear GS748T v5 switch and even though it seemed like the VLANs configs were correct, somehow my old PVID (Advanced-Port PVID Configuration) settings were messing things up.  The scenario I have is 4 ESX hosts, one Synology array, plus one Internet link.  I have four VLANS, 1=Default/home network, 10=iSCSI, 20=Internet, 30=VSAN traffic.  I just upgraded my hosts to the Intel NUC's (because I want to be like William Lam),  These Intel NUC's can only use the 1 onboard NIC with vSphere 6.0 U2 right now, hopefully someone will integrate a USB nic driver soon.  So back to my challenge, the ESX hosts can ride on the default network and use VLAN tagging for access to the other 3 networks. My internet connection is a dumb device that can't use VLAN tagging, so I needed to find a way of integrating it.  Normally that would just be an untagged port, but that doesn't work on these Netgear Switches.  In order to get that to work I had to setup PVID, I used port g1 for Internet and g48 for iSCSI, and g39-42 for the ESXi hosts.  The key here is that in the PVID settings, the port must be a Member of the VLAN, but not Tagged.

That seems to be working well.  From the VLAN membership tab, I left my default VLAN (1) everywhere but the two untagged ports I will need my storage and internet connected to.  For the other 3 VLANs I mostly emptied it out and set it up like this:

If you have a similar setup and you get stuck, I hope this helps you!