This section provides information about customizing the networking settings of your appliance host.
Your PlateSpin Forge appliance has six physical network interfaces configured for external access:
External Test Network: To isolate network traffic when testing a failover workload with the Test Failover feature.
Internal Test Network: For testing a failover workload in complete isolation from the production network.
Replication Network: To provide the system with networking designated for ongoing traffic between your production workload and its replica in the Management VM.
Production Network: For real-life business continuity networking when performing a failover or a failback.
Management Network: The Forge VM network.
Appliance Host Network: Hypervisor management network. This network is unavailable for selection in the PlateSpin Forge Web Interface.
By default, PlateSpin Forge ships with all 6 physical network interfaces mapped to one vSwitch in the hypervisor. You can customize the mapping to better suit your environment. For example, you can protect a workload that has two NICs, one of which is used for production connectivity, and the other strictly for replications. See Move / Create a vSwitch on your Forge Appliance, Knowledgebase Article 7921062.
To further fine-tune the control of your network traffic, consider assigning a different VLAN ID to each of the individual port groups. Separate VLANs help to ensure that your production network is not interfered with by traffic from workload protection and recovery operations. See Assigning VLAN Tags to Forge Port Groups, Knowledgebase Article 21057.