Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Creating and Confi guring Virtual
Networks
Eventually, it all comes back to the network. Having servers running VMware ESXi with VMs
stored on a highly redundant Fibre Channel SAN is great, but they are ultimately useless if the
VMs cannot communicate across the network. What good is the ability to run 10 production
systems on a single host at less cost if those production systems aren't available? Clearly, virtual
networking within ESXi is a key area for every vSphere administrator to understand fully.
In this chapter, you will learn to
Identify the components of virtual networking
Create virtual switches and distributed virtual switches
Create and manage NIC teaming, VLANs, and private VLANs
Examine the options for third-party virtual switches in your environment
Coni gure virtual switch security policies
Putting Together a Virtual Network
Designing and building virtual networks with ESXi and vCenter Server bears some similari-
ties to designing and building physical networks, but there are enough signii cant differences
that an overview of components and terminology is warranted. So, we'll take a moment here to
dei ne the various components involved in a virtual network, and then we'll discuss some of the
factors that affect the design of a virtual network:
vSphere Standard Switch A software-based switch that resides in the VMkernel and
provides trafi c management for VMs. Users must manage vSphere Standard Switches inde-
pendently on each ESXi host. You'll see us use the term vSwitch to refer to both a vSphere
Standard Switch as well as a virtual switch in general.
vSphere Distributed Switch A software-based switch that resides in the VMkernel and
provides trafi c management for VMs and the VMkernel. Distributed vSwitches are shared
by and managed across entire clusters of ESXi hosts. You might see vSphere Distributed Switch
abbreviated as VDS ; we'll use VDS , vSphere Distributed Switch , or just distributed switch in
this topic.
 
 
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