Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
network topology, requirements for the support of LACP or port mirroring, and the
connectivity needs of the VMs in the environment are all factors that will play a role in
the i nal network design. These are some common questions to ask while designing the
network:
Do you have or need a dedicated network for management trafi c, such as for the
management of physical switches?
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Do you have or need a dedicated network for vMotion trafi c?
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Are you using 1 Gb Ethernet or 10 Gb Ethernet?
Do you have an IP storage network? Is this IP storage network a dedicated net-
work? Are you running iSCSI or NAS/NFS?
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Do you need extremely high levels of fault tolerance for VMs?
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Is the existing physical network composed of VLANs?
Do you want to extend the use of VLANs into the virtual switches?
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Create virtual switches and distributed virtual switches.
vSphere supports both vSphere
Standard Switches and vSphere Distributed Switches. vSphere Distributed Switches bring
new functionality to the vSphere networking environment, including private VLANs and a
centralized point of management for ESXi clusters.
Master It
You've asked a fellow vSphere administrator to create a vSphere Distributed
Switch for you, but the administrator is having problems completing the task because he
can't i nd out how to do this with an ESXi host selected in the vSphere Web Client. What
should you tell this administrator?
Solution
vSphere Distributed Switches aren't created on a per-ESXi-host basis but
instead span multiple ESXi hosts at the same time. This is what enables the centralized
coni guration and management of distributed port groups. Tell the fellow vSphere ad-
ministrator to navigate to the Distributed Switches area of the vSphere Web Client in
order to create a new vSphere Distributed Switch.
Master It
As a joint project between the networking and server teams, you are going to
implement LACP in your VMware vSphere 5.5 environment. What are some limitations
you need to know about?
Solution
While vSphere 5.5 boasts enhanced LACP support over previous versions of
vSphere, there are still limitations. You can't have multiple active link aggregation groups
(LAGs) for a particular distributed port group. You also can't have both LAGs and stand-
alone uplinks active for a given distributed port group. However, different distributed
port groups could potentially use different LAGs, if so desired. The enhanced LACP sup-
port also requires the use of a version 5.5.0 vSphere Distributed Switch.
Create and manage NIC teaming, VLANs, and private VLANs.
NIC teaming allows
virtual switches to have redundant network connections to the rest of the network. Virtual
switches also provide support for VLANs, which provide logical segmentation of the net-
work, and private VLANs, which provide added security to existing VLANs while allowing
systems to share the same IP subnet.
