Network Ports needed for VMware Products

Posted on 2 mins read

As usual looking for this list of which ports need to be punched through the firewall in order allow all kinds of services to work correctly.

Well today – I tried to scan a host for (that is behind a firewall) and vCenter failed with this error message:

image

Now since I knew that this was behind a firewall and only the needed ports are opened (the way it should be) I knew that it was a firewall problem, also because scanning other hosts (not behind this firewall) worked fine.

So after looking at the logs on the firewall it showed that the communications were being dropped
ESX –> vCenter on port 9084
vCenter –> ESX on port 5989

Opening up the ports allowed for the Scan and Remediation to complete successfully

Now of course looking for the list of ports needed to be opened for proper communication
 on Google – two links came to mind..

  1. Greg A. Lato – VMware Network Portlist
  2. VMware KB

So after adding the list from the KB above into an useable list, you can add the excel file below to your useful list of documents can use as well.

VMware Network Ports

Hope you you make use of this in your troubleshooting adventures!

Edit for this post – 21/04/2010

I would also like to point to two notable mentions and other resources that are of great benefit.

  1. Forbes Guthrie’s page - Firewall diagram – version 5
  2. Hany Michael’s page - Diagram: VMware vSphere 4.0 in The Enterprise