Essendon wrote: » Both programs will work, performance is slightly better with using ESXi as your bare-metal OS than with Workstation. There are hundreds of blogs/articles on the internet that will walk you through the process of setting up a lab with either. Since you already have ESXi on the beefier machine, just create VMs like you usually would on it and keep them all on the same network (for simplicity to begin with). Best thing about nested ESXi is you dont need to add any cards since it's all in software. How much RAM and disk do you have on the server and what kind of server is it anyway?
Essendon wrote: » That sounds like a decent machine. Why do you want to assign a NIC to each VM? VLANs?
Essendon wrote: » Thanks for the explanation. Looks like you want to passthrough the pNICs to your VMs. Look at this VMware kb. You can passthrough upto 8 devices and there are a number of considerations, go through the linked article. I havent ever done this so cant speak from experience but I suggest you try passing through a NIC to a VM and see if there are any issues before you go about on a buying spree for the cards. While I understand what you are trying to do, what I dont understand is why you dont want to use VLANs (is the Cisco switch not VLAN capable?). In the real world too, you dont have 16 ports on a host (think blades) to play with.
