6.5.1

Figure 2‑1. vSphere Standard Switch architecture
Management
traffic
vMotion
traffic
Virtual
port
vmknic
VMVMVMVM VMVMVMVM
vminc0 vminc1 vminc3
Uplink port group
uplink port 0
uplink port 1 uplink port 2
ESXi host 2
ManagementvMotion
Test
environment
Production
Management
Management
traffic
vMotion
vMotion
traffic
Test
environment
Production
Physical network adapters
Physical Switch
vminc0 vminc1 vminc3
Uplink port group
uplink port 0
uplink port 1 uplink port 2
ESXi host 1
vNIC
Network
production
Port
groups
A vSphere Standard Switch is very similar to a physical Ethernet switch. Virtual machine network
adapters and physical NICs on the host use the logical ports on the switch as each adapter uses one
port. Each logical port on the standard switch is a member of a single port group. For information about
maximum allowed ports and port groups, see the Configuration Maximums documentation.
Standard Port Groups
Each port group on a standard switch is identified by a network label, which must be unique to the current
host. You can use network labels to make the networking configuration of virtual machines portable
across hosts. You should give the same label to the port groups in a data center that use physical NICs
connected to one broadcast domain on the physical network. Conversely, if two port groups are
connected to physical NICs on different broadcast domains, the port groups should have distinct labels.
For example, you can create Production and Test environment port groups as virtual machine networks
on the hosts that share the same broadcast domain on the physical network.
A VLAN ID, which restricts port group traffic to a logical Ethernet segment within the physical network, is
optional. For port groups to receive the traffic that the same host sees, but from more than one VLAN, the
VLAN ID must be set to VGT (VLAN 4095).
vSphere Networking
VMware, Inc. 17