SureBackup: how to support multple gateways within a VLAN?

[mikeely]

One of the networks I'm trying to map looks a bit like one of those old houses that's been added to half a dozen times, where you go up into the attic and there's a whole roof inside the outer roof, when the hot water goes out it only goes out for half the house, and so on.

The network has six segments, each with its own gateway, and it's the one that the majority of our VMs use. Trying to add multiple vNICS to the same interface fails with "vNIC with such isolated network connected already exists."

Trying to figure out which of the hundred-plus VMs that use the VLAN in question are on which network segment is simply not feasible. How do I thread this needle?

[vnikiforov]

Hello, Mike,

A production network can map to only one isolated network, and each isolated network gets one vNIC on the proxy appliance, so one virtual lab can act as the gateway for only one subnet per port group. Both limits are listed under Important in Create Isolated Networks and Specify Network Settings. The same case came up in this thread.

The virtual lab maps networks by port groups. Create one port group per subnet with the same VLAN ID (so layer 2 stays the same) and move each VM's vNIC to the port group of its subnet. The virtual lab then sees six production networks, and each gets its own isolated network and a vNIC with that subnet's gateway IP. With Route network traffic between vNICs selected, servers in different subnets see each other in one lab. Six networks fit within the limit of 9 per virtual lab. Run a backup after the move, because the lab starts VMs from restore points that still carry the old port group.

To find the subnet of each VM and maybe automate the assignment to the specific portgroup could be done with PowerCLI scripts or python vmware libraries. (codex or claude will help)