I have a tricky networking setup that I really need some advice on. The story goes like this: we have a new physical host at a well-known hosting company (VMware Server 1.0.1, RHEL, 2.6.x kernel). We requested 8 IP addresses for the setup, thinking that we would use VMware's bridged networking, and assign the 7 unused IP addresses to virtual machines.
However, what we were given was (a) 1 (primary) IP address for the host, and (b) 8 IP addresses \*in a different subnet* which were all set up as alias IP addresses for the host. This means that we can't use bridged networking, since the virtual machines can't have an IP address in the same subnet as the host's primary IP address.
The situation will be workable if we can forward the traffic from each alias IP address to a particular virtual machine. While VMware's NAT supports port forwarding, it doesn't distinguish between traffic addressed for the primary IP address and traffic address for an alias IP address.
Can anyone tell me if it is possible to use "iptables" to forward traffic from a particular alias IP address to a particular IP address in a (VMware) private subnet? Or is it impossible to distinguish whether the traffic was addressed for the primary IP address or an alias IP address? I'm new to IP address aliasing. Any help will be very greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance,
Cheers, Tony.