At this point my gut tells me that it is probably a bug of some sort with the nested ESXi hosts themselves. Having built working nested ESXi labs on various platforms as well as physical environments in the past I'm very confused as to why I can't get this particular setup to work.
Furthermore I was able to get all of this working on a Windows system running Workstation 10 (this is the laptop that my employer provides me with). Yet I know that there is a network with various VMs communicating on it. When I view the state of the ESXi host's NICs via vCenter or the embedded host client vmnic0 & 1 both show network information, but vmnic2 shows no networks. I have tried using LAN segments instead of the host-only network vmnet18 with no changes in results. I have tried various virtual hardware NICs as mentioned before, but with no changes in results. I have depolyed other non-ESXi VMs onto the vmnet18 network, and they are able to ping each other but are unable to ping or be pinged by the ESXI host. Using vmkping I have attempted to ping other nodes on the vmnet18 network, but that has been unsuccessful. Using vmkping I have pinged other nodes on the vmnet16 network successfully. I have verified that all IP adresses and netmasks being used are correct. promiscuous mode and forged transmits enabled on all vSwitch Port Groups (enabling or disabling these features makes no difference) vmk0 used for management on vSwitch0, and vmk1 to be used for iSCSI on vSwitch1 vSwitch1 uses vmnic2 on virtual network vmnet18 vSwitch0 uses vmnic0 & 1 on virtual network vmnet16 in an active/standby pair all use e1000 NIC virtual hardware, but also tried vmxnet3 NICs with no difference
build-3770994 (fully updated as of this posting)ĮSXi v6.0.0 (Build 3825889, fully update as of this posting)Ĥ "physical" NICs (only 3 being used for now) OS - Linux Mint 17.3 64-bit w/3.19.0-32-generic Linux kernel (fully updated as of this posting) That is why I'm posting here with the hope that if I did make a mistake that perhaps someone else can point it out to me. All of my troubleshooting suggests an issue with the nested ESXi hosts that may be a bug of some sort, but I want to make sure that I have done everything correctly first. I have a virtual lab environment running in VMware Workstation v12 for Linux, and my ESXi hosts are not working properly on one of the virtual networks.