To fully understand and utilize the power of vSphere as well as vCenter server, an important part of the vSphere virtual infrastructure are virtual switches. VMware recently killed off support for third party virtual switches and their integration into vSphere. The VMware Distributed vSwitch is certainly the path forward with virtual networking in vSphere. However, there are two kinds of VMware vSwitches – Standard and Distributed. Distributed switches hold many advantages over the vSphere Standard Switches including centralized configuration and management. Additionally, many of the VMware vSphere products require vSphere Distributed Switches to use advanced functionality such as VMware NSX. In part 1, we will look at the differences between Standard vSwitches and Distributed vSwitches, their use cases and we will look at creating Distributed vSwitches. In part 2, we will look at the process of adding Distributed vSwitches to ESXi hosts including beginning the migration process from the default Standard vSwitch0 over to the new Distributed vSwitch by way of moving the first physical adapter to the new Distributed vSwitch.
Standard vSwitches vs Distributed vSwitches
Let’s briefly take a moment to look at the differences, pros and cons of both the Standard vSwitch and the Distributed vSwitch. Starting with the Standard vSwitch, this is most likely the first vSwitch you will configure in working with VMware vSphere and ESXi. Your first Standard vSwitch is provisioned out of the box when you stand up the management network on an ESXi host. This initial Standard vSwitch provides the basic management and virtual machine connectivity needed to get up and running with a small VMware virtual machine environment. There are certainly environments out there as well that may run hundreds of virtual machines on Standard vSwitches. However, Standard vSwitches become less desirable as an environment grows and many hosts are provisioned in a vSphere cluster or multiple clusters.
Standard vSwitches do not leave the context of the ESXi host they are created on. In other words, if you want vMotion and other functionality including virtual machine traffic to work correctly between hosts, you have to configure the exact same vSwitches and port groups on all ESXi hosts to ensure network connectivity works as expected. Even a difference in capitalization between the naming of one port on one host and the supposed same port group on another host can cause issues. With this being said, Standard vSwitches do not scale well. When an environment grows to many hosts and virtual machines with several vSwitches and port groups involved, using automation with Standard vSwitches becomes essential to ensuring everything is the same across hosts.
Distributed vSwitches solve the scaling and standardization issues of Standard vSwitches by housing the management plane for the Distributed vSwitch in vCenter and the data plane is housed on each ESXi host – called a host proxy switch. Also, Distributed vSwitches offer but are not limited to the following list of features that are not found with Standard vSwitches:
- LACP Load balancing
- Network vMotion – network and traffic stats are maintained during a vMotion
- LLDP is supported on vDS switches
- Netflow
- Port Mirroring
- Private VLANs
Distributed vSwitches do require both Enterprise Plus licensing as well as vCenter as mentioned above. If you don’t have either one of these components, you will have to stick with the Standard vSwitch.
Creating Distributed vSwitches
To create Distributed vSwitches, we navigate to the Networking configuration in vCenter web client. Right-click on the Datacenter and select Distributed Switch >> New Distributed Switch.
This launches the New Distributed Switch wizard. Here we set the name of the Distributed vSwitch and the location. I like to append the Distributed vSwitch name with DVS. Here we show creating a Mgmt Distributed vSwitch. This may carry management traffic for your cluster and other infrastructure VMs, etc.
Next, we choose the version of Distributed vSwitch that we want to create. The vCenter web client gives us a good quick description of the functionality that was added for each version. As you can see with version 6.5.0, Port Mirroring Enhancements were added with 6.5.0 Distributed vSwitches.
On the Edit Settings portion of the New Distributed Switch wizard, a couple of areas we want to consider here are the Number of uplinks and the Port group name. A name I like to append to the front of the ort group that is descriptive is DPG to help distinguish between the vSwitch names and port group names.
Finally, the new Distributed vSwitch is read to be provisioned.
We now see the new DVS-Mgmt Distributed vSwitch and also the DPG-Mgmt port group created above. An uplink port group or dvuplinks port group is defined during the creation of the distributed switch as we see below.
Thoughts
VMware Distributed vSwitches offer several advantages over the Standard vSwitches in vSphere including centralized management, load balancing, port mirroring, IGMP snooping, LLDP support, etc. The management plane for the Distributed vSwitch is moved to vCenter and using the host proxy switch the switch settings are applied at the host level. Standard vSwitches still have their place especially in smaller environments or where Enterprise Plus licensing is not in use. In the next post, we will take a look at applying Distributed vSwitches to ESXi hosts, and migrating the first physical adapter from our Standard vSwitch0 management network over to the Distributed vSwitch we created.
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