Yesterday I setup an ESXi guest within a VMware Workstation host. Connected the guest to a custom network and ensured that a virtual adapter for this network is created on the host. Assigned IPs etc but whatever I do I couldn’t get the host and the guest to ping each other. Disabled firewalls, fiddled with the routes, no luck!
Finally I realized I had enabled a VLAN on the ESXi guest management interface. Doh! Even though both are on the same subnet, placing them on different VLAN means they are on a different network from each other and so obviously can’t communicate with each other unless you have a router in between!
I tried to set the VMware virtual adapter on the host to a different VLAN but couldn’t find any tools for doing. There are 802.1q drivers for supported physical adapters (and also for the “e1000” virtual network adapter for guests) that let you assign VLANs but I couldn’t find anything for the virtual adapter on the host side.