In this chapter, we understood the core components of networking in a virtual infrastructure. To sum it up, we are now able to choose between vNetwork standard and distributed virtual switches to connect virtual machine traffic and management networks to our physical network infrastructure. While distributed virtual switches offer the most advanced networking functionality, we can also address most of the network requirements with virtual standard switches as well. vNetwork Standard switches are defined on every ESXi host in our environment if we want to lower the management effort, we can go for distributed virtual switches which are centrally defined and configured in vCenter Server.

Planning and designing a virtual network infrastructure is mandatory. To make our setup reliable, we can choose ports of multiple multiport NICs as uplinks for virtual switches. Another approach to optimize availability is to use multiple networking and for storage components to be more fault tolerant...