Using a Distributed Virtual Switch

A DistributedVirtualSwitch managed object is a virtual network switch that is located on a vCenter Server. A distributed virtual switch manages configuration for proxy switches (HostProxySwitch). A proxy switch is located on an ESXi host that is managed by the vCenter Server and is a member of the switch. A distributed switch also provides virtual port state management so that port state is maintained when vCenter Server operations move a virtual machine from one host to another.

A proxy switch performs network I/O to support the following network traffic and operations:

  • Network traffic between virtual machines on any hosts that are members of the distributed virtual switch.
  • Network traffic between a virtual machine that uses a distributed virtual switch and a virtual machine that uses a VMware standard virtual switch.
  • Network traffic between a virtual machine and a remote system on a physical network connected to the ESXi host.
  • vSphere system operations to support capabilities such as VMotion or High Availability.

A DistributedVirtualSwitch is the base distributed switch implementation. It supports a VMware distributed virtual switch implementation and it supports third party distributed switch implementations. The base implementation provides the following capabilities (defined in the DVSFeatureCapability object):

  • NIC teaming
  • Network I/O control
  • Network resource allocation
  • Quality of service tag support
  • User-defined resource pools
  • I/O passthrough (VMDirectPath Gen2)

A VmwareDistributedVirtualSwitch supports the following additional capabilities (defined in the DVSFeatureCapability and VMwareDVSFeatureCapability objects):

  • Backup, restore, and rollback for a VMware distributed virtual switch and its associated portgroups.
  • Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) configuration.
  • Health check operations for NIC teaming and VLAN/MTU support.
  • Monitoring switch traffic using Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX).
  • Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP).
  • Virtual network segmentation using a Private VLAN (PVLAN).
  • VLAN-based SPAN (VSPAN) for virtual distributed port mirroring.
  • Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) defined for uplink portgroups.