
When customers want a group of virtual machines to share the security and teaming policies, they have to make sure the virtual machines are part of one dvportgroup. The virtual ports (dvports) connected to a dvportgroup share the same properties configured on a dvportgroup. The VLAN ID, traffic shaping, port security, teaming and load balancing parameters are configured on these dvportgroups. Similar to portgroups on standard switches, dvportgroups define how the connection is made through the VDS to the network. Customers always have an option to modify this dvuplink configuration based on the new hardware capabilities. Also, as the number of dvuplink configuration on VDS depends on the maximum number of physical Ethernet network adapters on a host, administrators should take that into account during dvuplink portgroup configuration. VMware recommends having consistent mapping across different hosts because it reduces complexity in the environment.Īs a best practice, customers should also try to deploy hosts with same number of physical Ethernet network adapters and with similar port speeds. Customers can choose different mapping if required where vmnic0 can be mapped to different dvuplink instead of dvuplink1. To illustrate the mapping of the dvuplinks to vmnics Figure 1 shows one type of mapping where ESXi hosts vmnic0 is mapped to dvuplink1 and vmnic1 to dvuplink2 and so on. When these hosts are added to the VDS with four dvuplinks configured on a dvuplink portgroup, administrators have to assign the network adapters (vmnics) of the hosts to dvuplinks. The Figure 1 below shows two ESXi hosts with four Ethernet network adapters each. This provides the advantage of consistently applying the teaming and failover configurations to all the hosts irrespective of how the dvuplink and vmnic assignments are made. When a host gets added to the VDS, each vmnic on the host is mapped to a dvuplink. All the properties including NIC teaming, load balancing, and failover policies on VDS and dvportgroups are applied to dvuplinks and not to vmnics on individual hosts. This new abstraction is called dvuplinks that gets defined during the creation of the VDS.

VDS has a new abstraction for the physical Ethernet network adapters (vmnics) on each host. Host Uplink Connections (vmnics) and dvuplink parameter In this section an overview of key VDS parameters is provided. All centrally configured network policies on VDS get pushed down to the host automatically when the host gets added to the distributed switch. As opposed to configuring vSphere standard switches (VSS) on individual hosts, administrators can configure and manage one single vSphere distributed switch. VDS simplifies the challenges of the configuration process by providing one single pane of glass to perform virtual network management tasks.

As the configuration of virtual networking goes hand in hand with physical network configuration, this section will cover both the VDS and Physical switch parameters. These are some key parameters that vSphere and network administrators have to take into account while designing VMware virtual networking.

Important virtual and physical switch parametersīefore diving into the different design options around the example deployment, let’s take a look at the VDS (virtual) and physical network switch parameters that should be considered in all these design options.
