Configure NICs as a switch in ESXi

ESXi 6.7u3, my host has 6 nics, I use one for connection to the network but i want to configure the remaining as a normal dumb switch, help needed. It seems that this should be rather straight forward but either it's not possible or i just can't get it to work. I'm using a ProtectLi Fw6. I need to basically run my VMs on the server and I need to connect laptops to the server using the extra nics and not have to rely on carrying a physical switch. I use the web access to ESXi and not VCenter but I can if needed. Is there anyway to do this natively with just ESXi?

Solution 1:

An ESXi vSwitch (or dSwitch for that matter) never forwards frames received by a physical NIC back through another physical NIC. Therefore, you can't do switching/bridging between physical ports with ESXi natively.

What you could do is to either install another ESXi-compatible virtual switch that does forward in between or install a VM with multiple (possibly dedicated) vNICs and some software in between that does the forwarding.

However, a virtual switch being quite expensive and a switching VM potentially performing quite poorly, I'd seriously recommend to use a hardware switch. A decent hardware switch which doesn't really cost that much is far superior in performance to any software switch you can buy or cook up.

Hardware switches use TCAMs and specialized backplanes to enable wire-speed forwarding with micro-second latency, even with multiple 10G ports or faster.