vSphere 6 Networking Deep Dive

The introduction section of this webinar covers virtual networking connectivity challenges, the role of virtual (hypervisor) switches and VM access to network and storage.

ESXi hypervisor supports two types of virtual switches: standard switch and distributed switch. This section describes their differences and the internal architecture of the distributed switch.

One of the most confusing aspects of vSphere environment is the way ESXi handles uplinks and failovers... making the approach familiar to networking engineers (Port channel/LAG) the worst possible option.

vSphere offers basic VLAN-based virtual networking isolation. This section describes how you can use VLANs in ESXi virtual switches and how to configure access or trunk ports connecting virtual machines to the virtual switch.

ESXi hypervisor uses internal NICs (VMkernel adapters) to connect to the virtual switch and through it to the outside world. This section describes some of the interesting details, including custom TCP stacks.

One of the most appreciated vSphere features is the ability to move a running virtual machine between hypervisors (vMotion) and the ability to move VM disks between storage systems (Storage vMotion). You'll find behind-the-scenes view of how these features work in this section.

Recent vSphere/ESXi versions provide rudimentary QoS functionality including classifying, marking, queuing and admission control.

ESXi hypervisor includes baseline networking security features, including MAC address checks and simple ACLs. Advanced security features and integration with third-party products is available with VMware NSX.

If you need very high VM network I/O performance you should consider one or more of the features described in this section: hypervisor bypass, SR-IOV, jumbo frames and TCP offloads.

vSphere provides numerous familiar traffic monitoring features, including packet capture, port mirroring and NetFlow.

Adapter FEX, Cisco Nexus 1000V and DFA are long gone. I left this section in the webinar the poor souls who still have to deal with those products; it might also be interesting for history buffs.