VMware: Uptime (VMware and Business Continuity): How to exploit the test bubble for all its worth.
It is important during a test failover to test your virtual
machines without them being visible to the production systems. Things like IP and name conflicts can
happen if you are not careful and they will ruin your day. So isolating those VM’s is important
but we need to do that in a way that we can still properly test.If you have only one ESX server you can use the
automatically generated test bubble network that connects the VM’s
together. This private virtual
switch will allow VM’s to talk to each other without the traffic leaving that
switch. So we are preserving the
important isolation. This is the
default for a recovery plan. It is
shown as Auto in the Test Network column when you edit the Network part of a
recovery plan. You can see this in
the screen shot below. You can
learn more about this on page 62 of the Admin Guide – URL for it is below.When you have multiple hosts, and you need VM’s on each of
the hosts to communicate with each other we cannot use the private virtual
switch method as it has too much isolation (it does not span hosts). The solution to that is to use an
isolated VLAN.
