Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Uplink Limits
Although a single vSwitch can be associated with multiple physical adapters as in a NIC team, a
single physical adapter cannot be associated with multiple vSwitches. ESXi hosts can have up to
32 e1000 network adapters, 32 Broadcom TG3 Gigabit Ethernet network ports, or 16 Broadcom
BN32 Gigabit Ethernet network ports. ESXi hosts support up to 8 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters.
Figure 5.7 and Figure 5.8 show a vSwitch bound to multiple physical network adapters. A
vSwitch can have a maximum of 32 uplinks. In other words, a single vSwitch can use up to 32
physical network adapters to send and receive trafi c from the physical switches. Binding mul-
tiple physical NICs to a vSwitch offers the advantage of redundancy and load distribution. In
the section “Coni guring NIC Teaming,” you'll dig deeper into the coni guration and workings
of this sort of vSwitch coni guration.
Figure 5.7
A vSwitch using
NIC teaming has
multiple available
adapters for data
transfer. NIC team-
ing off ers redun-
dancy and load
distribution.
vm1
vm2
ESXi host
vSwitch0
vmnic0
vmnic1
vmnic2
Physical
switch
So, we've examined vSwitches, ports and port groups, and uplinks, and you should have a
basic understanding of how these pieces begin to i t together to build a virtual network. The
next step is to delve deeper into the coni guration of the various types of ports and port groups,
because they are so essential to virtual networking. We'll start with a discussion on manage-
ment networking.
Confi guring Management Networking
Management trafi c is a special type of network trafi c that runs across a
VMkernel
port
.
VMkernel ports provide network access for the VMkernel's TCP/IP stack, which is separate and
independent from the network trafi c generated by VMs. The ESXi management network, how-
ever, is treated a bit differently than “regular” VMkernel trafi c in two ways:
◆
First, the ESXi management network is automatically created when you install ESXi. In
order for the ESXi host to be reachable across the network, it must have a management
