![]() ![]() Each ESXi host has an independent switch consisting of its data and control planes. The standalone version is not a feature-rich virtual switch and supports standard VLAN and control planes consisting of CDP. The Standalone vswitch lacks advanced features but gains in performance. The virtual NIC is a software construct emulated by the hypervisor. You may have different VMs in Port Groups in the same VLAN communication freely. Port Groups are nothing special, simply management groups based on configuration templates. The diagram displays a virtualized environment with two sets of VMs, blue and red, attached to corresponding Port Groups. Even if you change the physical cards in the server, the VM does not care as it does not see the physical hardware. The VMs are now isolated and think they have a virtual Ethernet adapter. These virtual switches have ports, and the hypervisor presents what looks like a NIC to every VM. ![]() To enable virtual switching, there are three distinct virtual switches in a VMware environment a) standalone virtual switch, b) distributed virtual switch, and c) 3rd party distributed switch, such as Cisco Nexus 1000v. Essentially, the virtual switch aggregates multiple VM traffic across a set of links and provides frame delivery between VMs based on Media Access Control (MAC) address, all of which fall under the umbrella of virtual switching. ![]() ![]() There are possibilities for micro-segmentation and VM NIC firewalls, but let’s deal with them in a later article. Traffic across VLAN boundaries is passed to a security or routing device northbound to the switch. By implementing a Layer 2 switch within the ESXi hosts, traffic flowing from VMs within the same VLAN is locally switched. To get VMs to communicate out an uplink or even to each other internally, we need a network of some kind to support communication flows. The physical host does not have enough network cards to allocate a physical NIC to every VM, there are exceptions, for example, Cisco VM-FEX, but generally speaking, we have more virtual machines than physical network cards. In a VMware virtualized environment, we typically have a single host running multiple virtual machines (VM) through the VMkernel hypervisor. ![]()
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