Adding a static route to ESXi

Hi readers,

This short post will be about how I had to set-up a static route on ESXi to my VPN subnet.

My setup is as follows: I have an ESXi server in DC1, and a ESXi server at home. The Home ESXi server has vCenter and vRealize Operations Manager on it. My goal was to have vRealize Operations Manager give rightsize advise on VMs on both my home server and the server in DC1. For this to work, I need to add my DC1 server to my vCenter server. I created a datacenter for it in vCenter, and I created a vmkernel adapter on the LAN network of the DC1 server. There is an IPSec VPN that links the remote network and my local network.

vCenter could talk to the ESXi server, but the ESXi server did not know how to talk back. The solution was to create a static route. I simply ran this command on the DC1 server (I enabled SSH and use that to execute the command):

esxcfg-route -a 192.168.254.0/24 172.16.100.1

And that was it! It started to work. In a future series, I will be explaining how to setup vRealize Operations Manager.

For now though, I’m still playing around with it.

Thank you for reading this post.