Today I want to wirte down new things I have learnt recently about vNetwork Standard Switch in vSphere 4.1 and why it doesn't need Spanning Tree protocol.
I assume you already have basic knowledge about switching, vlans, switching loops, Spanning tree protocol and any type of link aggregation protocols. I will go very quickly through main features of standard vSwitches focusing on facts that are not very obvious from official documentation, at least for me. Generally speaking, this article will be more useful for people that already has some experience with vSphere networking.
The main goal of standard vSwitch is to provide connectivity between your virtual machines and physical network infrastructure. Additionaly, it provides logical division of your VMs with PortGroups, offers different Load Balancing algorithms in case you have more that one uplink, supplies egress traffic shaping tool (from VMs to physical switches) and finally, provides Network Uplink failover detection.
I assume you already have basic knowledge about switching, vlans, switching loops, Spanning tree protocol and any type of link aggregation protocols. I will go very quickly through main features of standard vSwitches focusing on facts that are not very obvious from official documentation, at least for me. Generally speaking, this article will be more useful for people that already has some experience with vSphere networking.
The main goal of standard vSwitch is to provide connectivity between your virtual machines and physical network infrastructure. Additionaly, it provides logical division of your VMs with PortGroups, offers different Load Balancing algorithms in case you have more that one uplink, supplies egress traffic shaping tool (from VMs to physical switches) and finally, provides Network Uplink failover detection.
