Creating a virtual switch between two VMs, without a physical uplink, in VMware ESXi/vSphere

Question

I am trying to create a virtual switch in VMware ESXi 6.7.0, to be used only for communicating between two virtual machines.

I created the switch without an uplink and added it to two machines. In the first VM (Windows Server 2016 machine with two adapters, one with physical uplink and the other one virtual), I can see the adapter for this vSwitch. However, in the second one, there are no adapters (Windows 10 Pro).

What could be wrong with this setup?

Solution

You can create a new port group either on an existing vSwitch or on a new vSwitch. For a new vSwitch you assign no physical NICs, for the existing vSwitch you Override switch failover order and remove all physical NICs. The guests' vNICs are then simply connected to that port group. If there's no vNIC for a VM you just add it.

I'd recommend using a new port group on an existing vSwitch because you could later on connect the group to a physical VLAN - in case you need the port group to work across multiple hosts (which requires appropriate configuration of the physical switches as well, of course).

Comments

[Tobias]

Did you resolve this issue by now? Are there no adapters visible in Windows? Or are you not able to select the internal portgroup in the vm network adapter settings?