VMware on Cloud

 VMware vSphere is well known Virtualization product, IBM Cloud provides different type of VMware solutions here. This allowing you to leverage your existing investments for a consistent VMware experience—retaining the same level of access, security, and control. What's more, we give you the flexibility of managing it yourself or having IBM manage it for you. IBM cloud VMware vSphere  is a streamlined and optimised ordering platform for VMware, With this platform, you can build your own IBM-hosted VMware environment by customising and ordering the VMware-compatible hardware based on your selected VMware components on top of IBM classic environment.

Before discussing about Virtual networking, we need understand IBM classic infrastructure networking.

Understanding IBM cloud Classic networking

This IBM classic infrastructure environment provides mainly two types of network connectivity for BareMetal servers (ESXi hosts).

1. Public network: provides carrier grade internet connectivity to multi-home backbone carriers. On public IP, the connection is made to the IBM Cloud network PoP closest to the origin request. Traffic travels directly across the IBM Cloud datacenter to the datacenter network backbone into the correct datacenter, minimising the network hops and handoffs between providers that add network latency.
2. Private network: provides complete control of the secured networking traffic without performance degradation if significant public network traffic occurs at the same time.

Understanding VLANs and different types of Subnets in IBM cloud

The Virtual LAN (VLAN) assigned to you on the Classic Infrastructure network, provides an enterprise-grade private network with full isolation and security. Each VLAN is either public or private, and each VLAN is assigned to a specific datacenter for a specific IBM Cloud Account. Multiple types of subnets can route through same VLAN.

Types of Subnets:

1. Public and Private Primary Subnet

• Auto-assigned when provisioning resources (for example, Bare Metal) into a Public and Private VLAN

2. Public and Private Secondary Portable Subnet

• Appends new subnet to Public and Private VLAN
• Provides IP addresses for assignment to any resource within a VLAN, can route Portable IP to multiple resources as a Floating IP

3. Public Secondary Static Subnet

• Appends new subnet to Public VLAN
• Provides IP addresses for assignment to one resource within a VLAN (that uses the existing Primary IP or Portable IP of the resource as the "routing endpoint")

4. Public Secondary Global Subnet also known as Global IP addresses.

• Provides single IP address for assignment to one resource within any VLAN worldwide (using the existing Primary IP or Portable IP of the resource as the "routing endpoint")

There are multiple reasons for enabling internet access for Virtual machine, such as for hosting Internet websites or applications, For hosting cPanel servers, Sending and receiving emails etc. When comes to the virtual networking, there are two ways to connect your virtual machines to the internet from IBM cloud environment.

1. Using a dedicated NAT gateway appliance and Virtual Router Appliance, More details available here 
2. Assign Public IP to the virtual machine and route through ESXi Public network adapter.

Here we are explaining about the second method, this is very easy and cost-effective method. This is extension of existing document Virtual Networking, This is the method to enabling Internet access and Public IP address for your virtual machine, If you are building custom vSphere environment with help IBM classic BareMetal servers, or IBM cloud VMware vSphere service, The network configuration on your new virtual machine (VM) is done in a few steps. You need a separate portable IP block for both the public and private network. It is likely that your virtualization offering requires a secondary VM. This document is helping customer who want to create their own virtualisation environment on IBM cloud classic environment, This is the document to enable the internet connection for your virtual machine using new public IP address.

Please follow below detailed steps

1.  Create your BareMetal server with latest hypervisor version (ESXi) from IBM cloud portal with both private and public network.
 

   1.1  Choose the CPU, Memory, and storage disks as per your environment requirements.

   1.2  Choose both private and public networking with port redundancy as "user managed."

Here is the sample Hypervisor ESXi 7.x host server created.

2.  Once you Hypervisor is ready, configure your datastore on your preferred storage device and create a Virtual server.

   2.1  Here I created datastore on my local hard disk and created a CentOS virtual machine.

3.  Order a portable public subnet IP and attach to the ESXi primary public VLAN (here VLAN is dal10.fcr0848)
Portable Ips document available here https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/subnets?topic=subnets-about-subnets-and-ips#portable-subnet

   3.1  Find the example portable subnet created below4.

4.  Create a Virtual standard switch for connecting the virtual machine network.

   4.1 Create a virtual switch by navigating Networking  > Virtual switches > Add standard virtual switch from ESXi Web UI

Name the virtual and connect to your ESXi host public network NIC to the switch.

5.  Create a port group by navigating Networking > Port groups > Add port group, inside the new switch (here switch name is "Public switch") for connecting the virtual machine.

6.  Connect the virtual machine to this port group "Internet-PG".

7. Assign a portable IP and respective gateway to the Virtual machine and test the internet connection, Portable IPs, subnet, and Gateway details is available on Subnet details page.

Now the Virtual machine can send and receive traffic from and to the internet using new public IP.

Multiple ESXi hosts can be create under the same Public VLAN and create cluster with vSphere features HA and DRS, As this VM is running with portable IP, This portable IP can be routed through any ESXi server in same VLAN.
 

NOTES:

1. This logic networking can be used for other types of Hypervisors too (Like Hyper-V, KVM etc.)
2. This same way you can assign portable Private Ips to your VMs,

For further questions or concerns contact IBM cloud support