Hi,
I am hoping someone can amswer this question and save me (or my network bod) a lot of wasted effort. Basically we have installed a load of ESX servers into a networking infrastructure that uses Cisco Private VLAN Trunk ports. We have a private VLAN per customer, although all customers share the same subnet. I have created the relevant Port Groups in ESX, and once a VM is a port group it can see other physical servers in the same port group. It cannot however ping its default gateway and I cannot access it on the network. I have been told that because the ESX server is basically an IEEE Layer 2 Switch it does not understand the Cisco Private VLAN's. Although traffic leaves the server on the correct VLAN, when coming back, ordinarily with an access port, the edge switch would re-tag it to the correct VLAN. With a plain trunk port however it cannot do this so arrives back at the ESX server on the primary VLAN not the secondary and therefore is rejected. We can apparently set the ports to be Private VLAN Trunks, but they will only support one VLAN until we upgrade the IOS on all our switches. Then apparently you can have multiple VLANS, and this is done by the switch replicating the packet on all the VLANs and sending it out.
Obviously upgrading the IOS is a big job I want to avoid, and also I have no proof that this will resolve the issue. Has anyone had experience with ESX and Cisco Private VLAN's and could therefore point me in the right direction?
Thanks in advance.