As the title states, I have a system with ESXi that has 2 physical NICs, and a FreeNAS VM inside. Currently, I have one physical system connected via port 1 on the ESXI systems NIC, I can successfully connect to both the ESXi management network and the FreeNAS VM on said machine. I would like to set up a second physical system (port 2 on ESXi box NIC) to be able to access the FreeNAS VM, if not the ESXi management network also.
The current switch etc… setup inside VMware is currently untouched.
Why not use a network switch?
You might be able to do this via SR-IOV, but another method if you can’t is to make a second vSwitch, attach your dedicated NIC to the vSwitch, make a port group for the FreeNAS VM, and attach that as a second/the dedicated virtual NIC on the VM
I guess i could do this, and just plug the switch into port 1 on the ESXi box NIC, then the two other systems into the switch.
That sounds complicated :/. Can you expand at all?
Relooking at your question, you could just add the 2nd NIC to your vSwitch0. Then you can access things from the other NIC port