کانفیگ کردن VMware vSPhere 5.5 Distributed Switch

There will be quite a few things to consider when you need to decide weather to use Distributed vNetwork switch.
1. How large is your environment
Large environments will benefit much more from advanced features available on dvSwitch
2. Do you have enough NIC’s to use vSwitch effectively
If you have converged adapters and 10GbE adapters there may not be enough physical NIC’s to use the vSwitch effectively.
3. How your network is managed
If different (Network) team will manage virtual network then you can benefit from dvSwitch

In order to use Distributed switch Enterprise Plus license is required as well as vCenter Server. The main benefit of dvSwitch is its ability to span multiple ESXi hosts.

In some cases mixed environment of dvSwitch and vSwitches is the best solution.

1. Bidirectional Virtual Machine Rate Limiting or Traffic Shaping – dvSwitch adds capability to shape inbound and outbound traffic whete vSwitch only able to work with outbound traffic.
2. Private VLAN Support – dvSwitch provide PVLAN support.
3. Port Mirror – Port mirroring is used for monitoring. With port mirroring copy of packets from port or vlan send to monitoring device connected to switch prt.
4. Network I/O Control – Network I/O Control allows the creation of resource pools containing network bandwidth
5. NetFlow – It allows the monitoring of application flows or IP traffic
6. LLDP – dvSwitches include support for Link Layer Discovery Protocol
7. IEEE 802.1p Tagging – QoS standard at MAC ( media access control ) level.
8. Enhanced Security and Monitoring for vMotion Traffic – Provides more consistent view of vm network interfaces , simplifies monitoring and troubleshooting of vm’s
9. Dynamic Adjustment for Load-Based NIC Teaming – Improves performance of how NIC teaming feature.
10. Centralized vCenter Administration and Provisioning – Provides easy administration and single configuration to manage.
11. Network Health Check – feature used to quickly identify configuration errors on the network.
12. LACP support – LACP is standard link aggregation protocol which is supported with dvSwitch.
13. Traffic Filtering and Marking – Feature used for priority tagging.

Fail over and Load Balancing Policy – Determines how to deal with failed adapters and how traffic will be distributed.
Security Policy – Layer 2 frame filtering policies
Traffic Shaping Policy – Controls amount of bandwidth allowed
VLAN Policy – Establishes vlan ID for network connections.

Creating vNetwork Distributed Switch

1. Distributed Switch 5.5.0 (Traffic Filtering and Marking, enhanced LACP support)
2. Distributed Switch 5.1.0 (Management Network Rollback and Recovery, Health Check, Enhanced Port Mirroring, LACP)
3. Distributed Switch 5.0.0 (Network I/O Control, NetFlow, Port Mirroring)
4. Distributed Switch 4.1.0 (Load Based Teaming, Network I/O Control)
5. Distributed Switch 4.0

Note that distributed switch version follows the same version as vSphere. All of them add support for different features and features supported by later versions are not available in prior versions.

In this example we will create a version 5.5.0 dvSwitch

1. Enterprise Plus licensing
2. Minimum two ESXi 5.5 hosts with two available/unassigned physical NIC’s

In this LAB we will create dvSwitch named DSwitchLAB in datacenter called LAB-Datacenter.

1. Connect to a vCenter Server with vSphere Web Client.
2. On Home page go to vCenter -> Distributed Switches.

3. On the Objects tab click on Create New Distributed Switch. The name of our new distributed switch will be DswitchLAB and our datacenter is LAB-Datacenter.

4. Select Distributed Switch 5.5.0 , select Next.

5. Lets select all defaults on next screen. Uplink ports will connect our Distributed swicth to physical NIC’s and indicates max. Number of of NIC’S per host that can can connect to swicth.
When network I/O control is enabled, distributed switch traffic is divided into the following predefined network resource pools: Fault Tolerance traffic, iSCSI traffic, vMotion traffic, management traffic, vSphere Replication (VR) traffic, NFS traffic, and virtual machine traffic.
You can also create custom network resource pools for virtual machine traffic. You can control the bandwidth each network resource pool is given by setting the physical adapter shares and host limit for each network resource pool.
6. Review information and click Finish to add the switch.
7. Select the dvSwitch you just created and right click it. Under Edit Settings review General and Advanced features.

The switch is now created but we are not done yet. Next step will be adding ESXi Hosts to our newly created switch.

1. Connect to a vCenter Server with vSphere Web Clinet.
2. On the Home page, click vCenter -> Distributed Switches in the left pane.
3. Right click our newly created Distributed switch and Choose Add and Manage Hosts

4. Choose Add Hosts screen, click the green plus sign and we will select our 2 ESXi hosts , in our case 192.168.2.13 and 192.168.2.14

5. Ones selected click ok to continue. Verify our hosts listed and status shows as Connected. Click next to continue.

6. Review information on Select Network Adapter Tasks screen and click Next to continue.

7. In our example we have 2 ESXi hosts and each with 2 adapters. Vmnic0 assigned to vSwitch0, the remaining vmnic1 we will assign to dvSwitch.
8. Select vmnic1 on the first ESXi host and then click on Assighn Uplink, click Uplink 1 and then select ok. Do the same on the second hosts. Your manage physical network adapters screen should look like on the image.

9. Review Manage Vmkernel Network Adapters screen. Click Next
10. Review Analyze impact screen. Click Next.
11. Review Ready to Complete. Click Next.
12. When task completes our dvSwitch will be created. At this point go to vCenter->Hosts and Clusters. Select one of the hosts , select Manage tab. Click on Networking tab to review configuration. It should look simular to image.

 

1.. Connect to a vCenter with vSphere WEB Clinet
2. On the Home tab, click Networking. Select DSwitchLAB right click on it and select New Distributed Port Group.

3. For the name we enter LAO-Servers-PortGroup-vlan10 click next.

4. In our case we chose vlan 10 for our server network. Click Next after you review your settigns.

5 Under vCenter networking your should see your Port Group created.

Now our dvSwitch created and configured. There will be number of configuration options we will leave out for now. We will use Static binding as it is default and is recommended by VMWare for general use. With static binding, a dvPort is immediately assigned and reserved when the virtual machine is connected to dvPort.