Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Essentials

Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.5 Essentials

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (20 chapters)
VMware vSphere Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Virtual network


Virtual network provides the networking for virtual machines and ESXi hosts. Like we have physical switches in our physical network, in virtual network the fundamental component is a virtual switch.

An overview of virtual switches

A virtual switch is a software-based switch built inside the ESXi kernel (VMkernel), which is used to provide networking for the virtual environment. The traffic which flows from/to virtual machines is passed through one of the virtual switches present in VMkernel. So the virtual switch provides the connection for virtual machines to communicate with each other, whether they are running on the same host or on different hosts.

A virtual switch allows management of ESXi hosts, migration of virtual machines, and access to IP based storage. A virtual switch works at Layer 2 of the OSI model. We cannot have more than one virtual switch connected to the same physical NIC, but we can have more than one physical NIC connected to the same virtual switch. We...