How to create an isolated VDC network

Overview

An organisation virtual data centre network enables its virtual machines (VMs) to communicate with each other or to provide access to external networks. A single VDC can have multiple networks.

There are two network flavours, isolated and routed:

An isolated (internally connected) network is one that only VMs within the VDC can connect to. This guide describes how to create an isolated VDC network.
A routed network (externally connected) provides access to machines and networks outside the VDC via the edge gateway. You can have up to nine usable routed networks per VDC. Creation of routed networks is described in How to create a routed VDC network.

The steps for creating an isolated VDC network depend on the version of vCloud Director available in your environment.

vCloud Director 9.7
vCloud Director 9.1

In the vCloud Director Virtual Datacenters dashboard, select the VDC in which you want to create the network.
In the left navigation panel, select Networks.
Click Add.
In the Network Type page of the New Organization VDC Network dialog box, select Isolated then click Next.
In the General page, enter a Name and Description for the network.
In the Gateway CIDR field, the gateway address for the network.
Select the Shared option to make the network available to other VDCs within the same region.
Click Next.
In the Static IP Pools field, enter a range of addresses to be consumed by the VMs connecting to the network, then click Add.

As an example, if you give the gateway address as 192.168.1.1/24, you may then want to create a Static IP Pool of 192.168.1.10-192.168.1.100. This will give you a pool of 91 IP addresses to assign to machines within your network. You can always increase this later if needed.

You can add multiple IP pools.
When you're done, click Next.
In the DNS page, enter DNS information if possible then click Next.
On the Ready to Complete page, review your selections then click Finish.

In the vCloud Director Virtual Datacenters dashboard, select the VDC in which you want to create the network.
In the left navigation panel, select Network.
Click the Add button.
In the Add Org VDC Network dialog box, from the Type radio buttons, select Isolated network within this Virtual Data Center.
Confirm that you're creating the network in the correct Org VDC.
Enter a Name and Description for the network.
If you want to make the network shareable with other VDCs, select the Share this network with other VDCs in this organization check box.
Create a network Gateway address and Network mask, and add a DNS if possible.
The Static IP Pool is similar to DHCP in the sense that it's a range of IP addresses to be consumed by the VMs connecting to the network.

In the Static IP Pool field, enter a range of addresses to be consumed by the VMs connecting to the network, then click Add.

As an example, if you give the gateway address as 192.168.1.1, you may then want to create a Static IP Pool of 192.168.1.10-192.168.1.100. This will give you a pool of 91 IP addresses to assign to machines within your network. You can always increase this later if needed.
When you're done, click Save.

Next steps

Now you've created your network to connect your VDC with the outside world, may want to configure your edge gateway to control what traffic is allowed into and out of your VDC. You may also wan to start building some VMs. For a quick guide on how to do this, see How to build a virtual machine with UKCloud for VMware.

Feedback

If you find an issue with this article, click Improve this Doc to suggest a change. If you have an idea for how we could improve any of our services, visit the Ideas section of the UKCloud Community.