Book Image

Learning VMware vSphere

By : Rebecca Fitzhugh, Abhilash G B
Book Image

Learning VMware vSphere

By: Rebecca Fitzhugh, Abhilash G B

Overview of this book

Computer virtualization is a method to enable the running of multiple application workloads on a machine to achieve efficient utilization and reduce the number of physical machines in a data center. This has now become the foundation of many modern day data centers. What began as a technology to virtualize x86 architecture has now grown beyond the limits of a server’s hardware and into the realm of storage and network virtualization. VMware is currently the market leader in developing data center virtualization solutions. This book goes into the details of designing and implementing VMware solutions that form the foundation of a VMware infrastructure. The book begins by introducing you to the concepts of server virtualization followed by the architecture of VMware’s hypervisor – ESXi and then by its installation and configuration. You then learn what is required to manage a vSphere environment and configure advanced management capabilities of vCenter. Next you are taken through topics on vSphere Networking, Storage, ESXi Clustering, Resource Management and Virtual Machine Management. You will then be introduced to SSL Certificate Management and its use in a vSphere environment. Finally, you will learn about the lifecycle management of a vSphere environment by effectively monitoring, patching and upgrading vSphere components using Update Manager. By the end of the book, you will know how to use VMware’s vSphere suite of components to lay the foundation of a modern day virtual infrastructure.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning VMware vSphere
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

The standard virtual switch (vSwitch)


In previous sections, we covered the concepts that would help you understand how virtual switches work. There is lot more that a virtual switch offers in terms of features and configuration than just to switch layer-2 frames. We will cover the concepts and configuration of a standard vSwitch in this section.

We will cover the following in this section:

  • Port groups

  • Support for VLANs

  • Creating and configuring standard vSwitches

The standard vSwitch is a core networking construct of the ESXi hypervisor. A vSwitch - vSwitch0 is created during the installation to configure the management vmkernel interface (vmk0) on it. The following screenshot shows the default vSwitch created during the installation of ESXi:

We will learn more about configuring a standard vSwitch in the section, Creating and configuring standard vSwitches.

Port groups

Port groups are logical constructs to group virtual ports on a vSwitch. The standard vSwitch does not expose individual ports in...