6.7

Table Of Contents
VLAN VLAN enable a single physical LAN segment to be further segmented so
that groups of ports are isolated from one another as if they were on
physically different segments. The standard is 802.1Q.
VMkernel TCP/IP
Networking Layer
The VMkernel networking layer provides connectivity to hosts and handles
the standard infrastructure traffic of vSphere vMotion, IP storage, Fault
Tolerance, and vSAN.
IP Storage Any form of storage that uses TCP/IP network communication as its
foundation. iSCSI and NFS can be used as virtual machine datastores and
for direct mounting of .ISO files, which are presented as CD-ROMs to
virtual machines.
TCP Segmentation
Offload
TCP Segmentation Offload, TSO, allows a TCP/IP stack to emit large
frames (up to 64KB) even though the maximum transmission unit (MTU) of
the interface is smaller. The network adapter then separates the large
frame into MTU-sized frames and prepends an adjusted copy of the initial
TCP/IP headers.
Network Services in ESXi
A virtual network provides several services to the host and virtual machines.
You can enable two types of network services in ESXi:
n
Connecting virtual machines to the physical network and to each other.
n
Connecting VMkernel services (such as NFS, iSCSI, or vMotion) to the physical network.
VMware ESXi Dump Collector Support
The ESXi Dump Collector sends the state of the VMkernel memory, that is, a core dump to a network
server when the system encounters a critical failure.
The ESXi Dump Collector in ESXi supports both vSphere Standard and Distributed Switches. The ESXi
Dump Collector can also use any active uplink adapter from the team of the port group that handles the
VMkernel adapter for the collector.
Changes to the IP address for the ESXi Dump Collector interface are automatically updated if the IP
addresses for the configured VMkernel adapter changes. The ESXi Dump Collector also adjusts its
default gateway if the gateway configuration of the VMkernel adapter changes.
If you try to delete the VMkernel network adapter used by the ESXi Dump Collector, the operation fails
and a warning message appears. To delete the VMkernel network adapter, disable dump collection and
delete the adapter.
vSphere Networking
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