Working with vSphere Standard Switches

The networking architecture of ESXi revolves around the creation and configuration of virtual switches (vSwitches). These virtual switches are either vSphere Standard Switches or vSphere Distributed Switches. In this section, I'll discuss vSphere Standard Switches, hereafter called vSwitches; I'll discuss vSphere Distributed Switches in the next section.

You create and manage vSwitches through the vSphere Client or through the vSphere CLI using the vicfg-vswitch command, but they operate within the VMkernel. Virtual switches provide the connectivity to provide communication

• Between VMs within an ESXi host
• Between VMs on different ESXi hosts
• Between VMs and physical machines on the network
• For VMkernel access to networks for vMotion, iSCSI, NFS, or fault tolerance logging (and management on ESXi)