I’ve just been deploying Alistair Cooke’s awesome Autolab into VMWARE Workstation 8 on Ubuntu. Now, linux is a bit of a new beast for me, being a long time Windows guy, but we’ve all got to broaden our horizons now and then.
As I was registering the pre built VM’s a warning popped up about promiscuous mode not being able to be enabled. Not paying full attention and being keen to get a lab up and going, I ignored the warning and carried on.
The lab progressed smoothly until I went to add the hosts to the VC and saw this warning in the powershell script that adds and configures the hosts. I’d chosen the full autmation including deploying a nested guest.
After a quick bit of investigation with the first tool of choice (ping) I quickly came to the conclusion that there was something not quite right on any network using vlan’s. Having hit this before in my lab that I built for VCP5 practice and the faint memory of a warning earlier on in the day, I went a googling.
Very quickly I found this VMware kb http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=287. Effectively Workstation configures permissions for vmnet0 through to 3 to only allow root to enable promiscuous mode, which you need turned on for nested esxi with vlans configured, to work.
The moral of the story, do one thing at a time and pay heed to warning messages.
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