It’s been a while since I posted but I only recently started tinkering with things again in my free time.
I travel a lot now for work so I spend some lonely nights in hotel rooms with no internet. I have time to play.

Anyway, I wanted to host a repository for OmniOS because I’m preparing to switch from OpenIndiana. I have some resources free on my ESXi server I have at OVH.

OVH has this strange network thingy called vmac, you essential configure your NIC in ESXi/OpenVZ with a predefined MAC address and do some strange configuration on your guest OS. It boils down to you configure a /32 on the interface. Then do some routing to get it to work. You essentially send the traffic to your ESXi hosts gateway.

It took me some tinkering to get it to work but here is how I did it. (It applies to both OmniOS and OpenIndiana, most likely other Illumos based distro’s also)

Configuring the IP

ipadm create-if e1000g0
ipadm create-addr -T static -a 172.16.104.233/32 e1000g0/v4
ipadm show-addrprop e1000g0/v4

Nothing particular special here. However in the beginning I made the mistake of adding a vnic to e1000g0 and using that instead of the actually device. This had as result I was not using the OVH provided MAC address! (which does not work)

Remember to replace 172.16.104.233 with the failover ip form OVH and make sure to use /32.
Also make sure to check if the broadcast address is the SAME a your failover ip else stuff won’t work.

Setting up the routing

route -p add 10.16.0.0/24 172.16.104.233 -interface -ifp e1000g0
route -p add default 10.16.0.254 -static

Here it gets a bit tricky. Since we cannot reach the default gateway we need to add the network and tell the OS that is is also attached to e1000g0. The first lines accomplishes this. Then we add the default gateway as normal.

Make sure to use the network that your ESXi box is using, it is most likely an entire different network than your failover ip. The gateway for the route should be set to your failover ip, we also tell it to use e1000g0 as outgoing interface.

That’s it. At this point you should have a connection to the internet. Now all that is left is to configure the DNS client, NTP and whatever else you need.

Hopefully this is useful for somebody.