DITGUY2012 wrote:
1. The use of "no ip address" was not seen in many vmware discussions. Trying to understand that one better, although HeathReynolds says we don't need it. Case in point. Also it says to use access mode, yet everywhere else says trunk mode. It also doesn't mention edge portfast setting yet other vmware articles do.
You really can't talk about the "right" mode because it's dependant on your situation. If you only had a single VLAN running down a link you might elect to use access mode. This is particularly common where a NIC is dedicated to iSCSI. It's worth considering that the crash dump logger can't use a tagged VLAN so consider that.
Generally if you happen to want VMs running on multiple VLANs accessed over one NIC, then it's a trunk mode port.
Just think of it as connecting a switch to a switch. What's the "right" way? Trunk mode in general. What if your other switch is a "dumb" switch sitting on someone's desktop? Then that uplink would probably be an access port.
ESXi doesn't negotiate spanning tree so it should be configured as an edge on your switch. If you are running classic STP this may just look like "spanning-tree portfast" and should probably be accompanied by bpduguard.
The requirement for "no ip address" would depend heavily on whether your switch defaults to wanting to route on that port, in which case you may also want the "switchport" command. Because this is hardware dependant there can't be a "right" answer.