Vmware Networking and virtual switches

slinuxuzer

Ok, so I just watched this cbt nuggets video and have a question. I saw the instructor go in and break up his console port, his Vmkernal (I guess vmotion) and then another I believe this was his production nic into three different nics on three different virtual switches.

The questions is in ESX, are these virtual nics? or do all three have to be physical nics that he has setup in ESX?

and if they are three virtual that map over to one physical then whats the point?

Thanks.

astorrs

In ESX there are 3 different kinds of network connections.

VMkernel - used by VMotion, software iSCSI for block transfers, etc
Service Console - used by the service console, essentially the "management LAN"
Virtual machines - used by all the guest VMs

You can have multiple connections for each, but you do require at least one of each type (if you want full functionality).

Whether they map to a single NIC, each to its own NICs, or to multiple physical NICs for each is up to you. It is typical in a production VMware environment to have 4+ NICs in each machine (I personally don't go below this) and not uncommon to see more (especially in environments where iSCSI or NFS is the shared storage).