6.5.1

Table Of Contents
configured with the provisioning TCP/IP stack handle the traffic from cloning
the virtual disks of the migrated virtual machines in long-distance vMotion.
By using the provisioning TCP/IP stack, you can isolate the traffic from the
cloning operations on a separate gateway. After you configure a VMkernel
adapter with the provisioning TCP/IP stack, all adapters on the default
TCP/IP stack are disabled for the Provisioning traffic.
Custom TCP/IP stacks You can add custom TCP/IP stacks at the VMkernel level to handle
networking traffic of custom applications.
Securing System Trac
Take appropriate security measures to prevent unauthorized access to the management and system
traffic in your vSphere environment. For example, isolate the vMotion traffic in a separate network that
includes only the ESXi hosts that participate in the migration. Isolate the management traffic in a network
that only network and security administrators can access. For more information, see vSphere Security
and vSphere Installation and Setup.
System Trac Types
Dedicate a separate VMkernel adapter for every traffic type . For distributed switches, dedicate a
separate distributed port group for each VMkernel adapter.
Management traffic Carries the configuration and management communication for ESXi hosts,
vCenter Server, and host-to-host High Availability traffic. By default, when
you install the ESXi software, a vSphere Standard switch is created on the
host together with a VMkernel adapter for management traffic. To provide
redundancy, you can connect two or more physical NICs to a VMkernel
adapter for management traffic.
vMotion traffic Accommodates vMotion. A VMkernel adapter for vMotion is required both
on the source and the target hosts. Configure The VMkernel adapters for
vMotion to handle only the vMotion traffic. For better performance, you can
configure multiple NIC vMotion. To have multi-NIC vMotion, you can
dedicate two or more port groups to the vMotion traffic, respectively every
port group must have a vMotion VMkernel adapter associated with it. Then
you can connect one or more physical NICs to every port group. In this way,
multiple physical NICs are used for vMotion, which results in greater
bandwidth .
Note vMotion network traffic is not encrypted. You should provision secure
private networks for use by vMotion only.
Provisioning traffic Handles the data that is transferred for virtual machine cold migration,
cloning, and snapshot migration.
vSphere Networking
VMware, Inc. 62