Configuration vRack 2.0

In this guide we will look at how to configure vRack 2.0.

The vRack version 1.5 enables you to create 1 vRack and within this single vRack you would only have a single vLan. This means that you can only use each IP address once, with the vRack version 2.0 you can create up to 4000 vLans within a single vRack. This means that for each IP which you use, you can use it up to 4000 times by tagging each IP address on the vRack interface.

UNIX:

Once you have the basic setup of the vRack 1.5 the changes to enable vRack 2.0 is done from the configuration level under the OS of the server. Based on our previous configuration we had:

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.0.50
netmask 255.255.0.0
broadcast 192.168.255.255

We have set the server to have the private IP address of 192.168.0.1, there isn’t any tagging on the server. This means that the IP address can only be used once otherwise it will cause IP collision. To make use of the vRack 2.0 we need to run the following commands:

vconfig add eth1 10

Here we can see that we have specified the eth1 interface to tag the connection LAN of 10:

Added VLAN with VID == 10 to IF -:eth1:-

We would also need to declare the IP address range within the vRack 2.0. We can do this with the following command:

ip addr add 192.168.0.0/16 dev eth1.10

This will activate the address range for the interface eth1 for the tag value of 10.

By using our previous configuration we can make some changes to the adapter by declaring the tag for the vLan:

auto eth1.10
iface eth1.10 inet static
address 192.168.0.50
netmask 255.255.0.0
broadcast 192.168.255.255

This will change our IP configuration to become:

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:25:90:a6:aa:e9
          inet6 addr: fe80::225:90ff:fea6:aae9/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:5305 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:42 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:330014 (330.0 KB)  TX bytes:2936 (2.9 KB)
          Memory:fb900000-fb920000

eth1.10   Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:25:90:a6:aa:e9
          inet addr:192.168.0.50  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::225:90ff:fea6:aae9/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:89 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:34 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:7909 (7.9 KB)  TX bytes:2288 (2.2 KB)

Windows:

Under Windows Server 2012 R2 you need to make the changes under “Server Manager”:

Server Manager >> Local Server >> NIC Teaming >> Disabled

From here a new pop up window will appear. We will first need to create a new team:

NIC Teaming >> Bottom left box >> Task >> New Team

At this stage we will select our interface and define a team name:

1w

Now that we have our interface, we need to define the vLan tag under windows, this is done when you select the “Network Adapter Properties”:

2w

In our example we will use the vLan tag of 10.

That’s all.

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