6.5.1

Table Of Contents
Monitoring Network Connection
and Trac 14
Monitor network connection and packets that pass through the ports of a vSphere Standard Switch or a
vSphere Distributed Switch to analyze the traffic between virtual machines and hosts.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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Capturing and Tracing Network Packets by Using the pktcap-uw Utility
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Configure the NetFlow Settings of a vSphere Distributed Switch
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Working With Port Mirroring
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vSphere Distributed Switch Health Check
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Switch Discovery Protocol
Capturing and Tracing Network Packets by Using the
pktcap-uw Utility
Monitor the traffic that flows through physical network adapters, VMkernel adapters, and virtual machines
adapters, and analyze packet information by using the graphical user interface of network analysis tools
such as Wireshark.
In vSphere 5.5 or later, you can monitor packets on a host by using the pktcap-uw console utility. You
can use the utility without additional installation on an ESXi host. pktcap-uw provides many points in the
host network stack at which you can monitor traffic.
For detailed analysis of captured packets, you can save packet content from the pktcap-uw utility to files
in PCAP or PCAPNG format and open them in Wireshark. You can also troubleshoot dropped packets
and trace a packet's path in the network stack.
Note The pktcap-uw utility is not fully supported for backward compatibility across vSphere releases.
The options of the utility might change in the future.
pktcap-uw Command Syntax for Capturing Packets
Use the pktcap-uw utility to inspect the contents of packets while they traverse the network stack on an
ESXi host.
VMware, Inc.
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