A vSphere Standard or Distributed Switch can have virtual and physical network adapters. Physical network adapters are used to connect virtual switches to physical switches and have a name starting with vmnic. Virtual network adapters or VMKernel network adapters can be used to set various properties such as management traffic, vMotion, fault tolerance logging, IP address, and subnet mask. Virtual network adapters have a name starting with vmk. You can see virtual and physical network adapters in the screenshot given in the Creating vSphere Standard Switches section.
To create a new virtual network adapter or VMkernel port, you can use the New-VMHostNetworkAdapter cmdlet. The cmdlet creates a port group if the –PortGroup parameter is used. The syntax of this cmdlet is as follows:
New-VMHostNetworkAdapter [[-VMHost] <VMHost>] [[-PortGroup] <String>] [-PortId <String>] [-VirtualSwitch] <VirtualSwitchBase> [[-IP...