Management

Here’s where the NAS, the ESXi, routers and switches all exist, at least for management purposes. This is primarily meant to be a single network segment because it allows us to designate a port on the switch specifically for recovery purposes. By having access to virtually everything via the same VLAN, I can just plug a computer straight into the port tagged for this network and repair whatever outage I’ve caused.

Although this network is not originally intended to be a big throughput VLAN, I am using this segment for all direct connections between the baremetal ESXi and NAS. The NAS exists natively here, but do be aware that I am putting all media devices on a different segment. This means that the ESXi host itself can get to the NAS on the same L2 domain, but all services still need to pass through the firewall. Depending on how you want to mount the NAS into VMs/containers/services, this allows you to dictate a firewall layer on demand.