What is vSwitch in ESXi?

A vNetwork Standard Switch (vSwitch) is a virtual switch that can be configured on a single ESXi host. By default, this vSwitch has 120 ports. The maximum number of ports per ESXi host is 4096.

What is a vSwitch in VMware?

Like a physical switch, a virtual switch lets you connect other networking components together. Virtual switches are created as needed by the VMware Workstation software, up to a total of nine switches. You can connect one or more virtual machines to a switch.

What is ESXi promiscuous mode?

Promiscuous mode is a security policy which can be defined at the virtual switch or portgroup level in vSphere ESX/ESXi. A virtual machine, Service Console or VMkernel network interface in a portgroup which allows use of promiscuous mode can see all network traffic traversing the virtual switch.

How does VMware vSwitch work?

The vSwitch uses the physical NICs (pNICs) associated with the host server to connect the virtual network to the physical network. In VMware, these pNICs are also called uplink adapters. The vSwitch is responsible for routing network traffic to the VMkernel, the VM network, and the Service Console.

What is ESXi port group?

Port groups allow us to logically carve up our virtual ports that are available on a particular vSwitch. We can apply traffic policy rules at the port group level – security rules and traffic shaping. Port groups are where we can also assign VLANs to our traffic.

What are ESXi hosts?

ESX hosts are the servers/data storage devices on which the ESX or ESXi hypervisor has been installed. The use of hypervisors such as ESX and ESXi to create VMs (virtualization) is highly efficient, as one host device can support multiple (up to a dozen or more) VMs.

What is a Portgroup?

A port group, as the name implies, is a grouping of switch ports. By applying a network policy to a port group, one can enforce security and traffic shaping rules. When you create a network-enabled virtual machine, you are in fact connecting its virtual adapters to one or more port groups.

What is vSwitch uplink?

At the core of vSphere networking are virtual switches (vSwitches). As with a physical switch, a vSwitch has uplink ports. These are physical network adapter ports found within the ESXi host, and connect the virtual switch within the ESXi host to a physical switch.

How do I know if I have promiscuous mode?

Enable Promiscuous Mode

1. To enable the promiscuous mode on the physical NIC, run the following command on the XenServer text console: # ifconfig eth0 promisc.
2. Run the ifconfig command and notice the outcome: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1D:09:08:94:8A. inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe08:948a/64 Scope:Link.

Can you create a vSwitch without any uplink adapter?

In cases where no external communication is required, vSwitch can operate without uplinks. IP-based traffic is often segregated with the use of dedicated physical network adapters which can be connected to a separate set of switches.

What is the difference between vSwitch and dvSwitch?

vSphere Standard Switch is used to provide network connectivity for hosts, virtual machines and to handle VMKernel Traffic. Standard switch works with only with one ESXi host. vSphere standard switch bridge traffic internally between virtual machines in VLAN.

What is the difference between ESX and ESXi?

ESX is the predecessor of ESXi. The primary difference between ESX and ESXi is that ESX is based on a Linux-based console OS, while ESXi offers a menu for server configuration and operates independently from any general-purpose OS.

What’s the name of the vSwitch switch in ESXi?

On ESXi: Instead of esxcfg-vswitch, you can also use esxcli command to list vSwitches in ESXi as shown below. By default, each ESXi host has one virtual switch called vSwitch0.

What are the different types of vSwitches in VMware?

VMware vSwitches can be divided into two types: standard virtual switches and distributed virtual switches. A vNetwork Standard Switch (vSwitch) is a virtual switch that can be configured on a single ESXi host.

What is the difference between vSwitch and vSphere standard switch?

vSwitch is also referred as vSphere Standard Switch. vSwitch is the software-based virtual networking switch used to connect virtual machines to ESXi host & it also provides the connectivity between the virtual machines on that virtual switch. vSphere Standard Switch is referred as vSwitch.

How many vswithces can be created on one ESXi host?

The maximum number of vSwithces that can be created on a single ESXi host is 127. When two or more virtual machines connected to the same vswitch the traffic between them is routed locally and whenever it needs to connect to the outside world, the traffic is routed through the uplink adapter basically a NIC port attached to the virtual switch.