Datasheet

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CHAPTER 1 VMware VSphere 4 OVerView
Vi r t u a l ne t w o r k ad a P t e r S
VMware supports three types of virtual network adapters for virtual machines. The AMD Lance
PCNet32 and Intel E1000 physical network adapters provide full virtualization that is compatible
with most guest operating systems. VMware also provides the high-performance paravirtualized
network adapter VMXNET for networking virtual machines. In vSphere 4, VMware introduces
VMXNET 3, the third generation of this paravirtualized network adapter (Figure 1.10). VMXNET3
builds upon the earlier versions, VMXNET and Enhanced VMXNET, by adding these features:
MSI/MSI-X support (subject to guest operating system kernel support)
•u
Receive-side scaling (supported in Windows 2008 when explicitly enabled through the •u
device’s Advanced Configuration tab)
IPv6 checksum and TCP segmentation offloading (TSO) over IPv6
•u
VLAN offloading•u
Large TX/RX ring sizes (configured from within the virtual machine)•u
VMware includes two other network adapters, vswif and vmknic, for ESX/ESXi Service
Console and VMkernel, respectively. All these virtual network adapters support both IPv4
and IPv6. The support for IPv6 for the ESX/ESXi VMkernel and Service Console was added in
vSphere 4. vCenter Server 4 also supports IPv6 so that vSphere customers can manage mixed
IPv4/IPv6 environments. IPv6 support for network storage is considered experimental in
vSphere 4.0.
Vne t w o r k St a n d a r d Sw i t c h
Virtual switches allow virtual machines on the same ESX Server host to communicate with each
other using virtual ports and with an external network using uplink ports. These switches do
Figure 1.10
Setting a VMX-
NET3 network
adapter
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