Overview of vNetwork Distributed Switch concepts

Products

VMware vCenter Server VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

There are two types of virtual switches in ESXi; virtual Standard Switch and virtual Distributed Switch (vDS).

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable

Resolution

vNetwork Standard Switch (vSwitch, vSS)

The configuration of each standard switch resides on the specific ESXi/ESX host. The vSphere administrators have to manually maintain consistency of the vSwitch configuration across all ESXi/ESX hosts to ensure that they can perform operations such as vMotion.

vSwitches are configured on each ESXi/ESX host.

vNetwork Distributed Switch (dvSwitch, vDS)

The configuration of vDS is centralized to vCenter Server. The ESXi hosts that belong to a dvSwitch do not need further configuration to be compliant.

Distributed switches provide similar functionality to vSwitches. dvPortgroups is a set of dvPorts. The vDS equivalent of portgroups is a set of ports in a vSwitch. Configuration is inherited from dvSwitch to dvPortgroup, just as from vSwitch to Portgroup.

Virtual machines, Service Console interfaces (vswif), and VMKernel interfaces can be connected to dvPortgroups just as they could be connected to portgroups in vSwitches.

Administrative rights are required to create these virtual adapters on each ESXi/ESX host dvSwitch in vCenter Server:

Service Console and VMKernel interfaces
Physical NICs and their assignment to dvSwitch Uplink groups

For more information on configuring a dvSwitch in vCenter 6.5, see vSphere 6.5 Networking Guide.
For more information on configuring a dvSwitch in vCenter 6.7, see vSphere 6.7 Networking Guide.
For more information on configuring a dvSwitch in vCenter 7.0, see vSphere 7.0 Networking Guide.
For more information on configuring a dvSwitch in vCenter 8.0, see vSphere 8.0 Networking Guide.

Comparing vNetwork Standard Switch with vNetwork Distributed Switch

These features are available with both types of virtual switches:

Can forward L2 frames
Can segment traffic into VLANs
Can use and understand 802.1q VLAN encapsulation
Can have more than one uplink (NIC Teaming)
Can have traffic shaping for the outbound (TX) traffic

These features are available only with a Distributed Switch:

Can shape inbound (RX) traffic
Has a central unified management interface through vCenter Server
Supports Private VLANs (PVLANs)
Provides potential customization of Data and Control Planes

vSphere 5+ provides these improvements to Distributed Switch functionality:

Increased visibility of inter-virtual machine traffic through Netflow.
Improved monitoring through port mirroring (dvMirror).
Support for LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol), a vendor-neutral protocol.
The enhanced link aggregation feature provides choice in hashing algorithms and also increases the limit on number of link aggregation groups.
Additional port security is enabled through traffic filtering support.
Improved single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support and 40GB NIC support.

vSphere 6+ provides these improvements to Distributed Switch functionality:

Network IO Control – New support for per virtual machine Distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations to guarantee isolation and enforce limits on bandwidth.
Multicast Snooping - Supports IGMP snooping for IPv4 packet and MLD snooping for IPv6 packets in VDS. Improves performance and scale with multicast traffic.
Multiple TCP/IP Stack for vMotion - Allows vMotion traffic a dedicated networking stack. Simplifies IP address management with a dedicated default gateway for vMotion traffic.

Additional Information

Note: vDS now comes bundled with NSX for vSphere (NSXv) and VMware vSAN in vSphere 6.x.

For more information, see:

The Distributed Switch overview on the VMware vSphere product site
The vSphere product documentation
This VMware VROOM! Blog Improvements in Network I/O Control for vSphere 6

For translated versions of this article, see:

Configuring vNetwork Distributed Switch using vCenter Server
Visão geral de conceitos de Distributed Switch no vNetwork
Resumen acerca de los conceptos del conmutador distribuido vNetwork
vNetwork Distributed Switch 概念概述
vNetwork Distributed Switch コンセプトの概要