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With custom TCP/IP stack, you get following benefits:

  • Separate Memory Heap.
  • Personalized ARP Table.
  • Personalized Routing Table which helps avoiding routing table conflicts that might appear when many features are using a common TCP/IP stack.
  • Isolate traffic to improve network security.

Playing with the custom TCP/IP stacks and wanted to find out how I can benefit from it but all I can do with a custom TCP/IP stack is just create a vmknic on it. The vmknic on the custom TCP/IP stack even cannot be used to mount NFS shares. Googled a lot but found no use case how a custom TCP/IP stack is really used. It's also confusing even VSAN cannot benefit from using a separate TCP/IP stack.

Anyone can share some use case of using the custom TCP/IP stacks?

SF.express
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1 Answers1

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The main point of multiple TCP/IP stacks in ESXi is to cleanly separate guest, management, SAN, VMotion, etc. traffic.

Each stack has its own routing and it's literally impossible to hack the management interface to manipulate the iSCSI VMkernel interface. Also, if you break one of the stacks (esp. its routing) the others continue to work.

Zac67
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  • this is exactly why it's confusing. according to VMware there seems to be a big point of using separate stacks for different kind of network traffic. but actually the "guest" or "SAN" you mentioned cannot use a separate stack at all. even VMware's own VSAN cannot use its own stack. – SF.express Nov 13 '21 at 08:59
  • and back to my question -- what can you do with a **custom** tcp/ip stack? – SF.express Nov 13 '21 at 09:01