Setting Up Virtual Switches and Associating a Switch with a Network Interface

A virtual switch models a physical Ethernet switch. You can manage virtual switches and port groups by using the vSphere Web Client or by using vSphere CLI commands.

You can create a maximum of 127 virtual switches on a single ESXi host. By default, each ESXi host has a single virtual switch called vSwitch0. By default, a virtual switch has 56 logical ports. See the Configuration Maximums document on the vSphere documentation main page for details. Ports connect to the virtual machines and the ESXi physical network adapters.

• You can connect one virtual machine network adapter to each port by using the vSphere Web Client UI.
• You can connect the uplink adapter to the virtual switches by using vicfg-vswitch or esxcli network vswitch standard uplink. See Linking and Unlinking Uplink Adapters with vicfg-vswitch.

When two or more virtual machines are connected to the same virtual switch, network traffic between them is routed locally. If an uplink adapter is attached to the virtual switch, each virtual machine can access the external network that the adapter is connected to.

This section discusses working in a standard switch environment. See Networking Using vSphere Distributed Switches for information about distributed switch environments.

When working with virtual switches and port groups, perform the following tasks.

1. Find out which virtual switches are available and, optionally, what the associated MTU and CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) settings are. See Retrieving Information About Virtual Switches with ESXCLI and Retrieving Information About Virtual Switches with vicfg-vswitch.
2. Add a virtual switch. See Adding and Deleting Virtual Switches with ESXCLI and Adding and Deleting Virtual Switches with vicfg-vswitch.
3. For a newly added switch, perform these tasks.
   1. Add a port group. See Managing Port Groups with ESXCLI and Managing Port Groups with vicfg-vswitch.
   2. (Optional) Set the port group VLAN ID. See Setting the Port Group VLAN ID with ESXCLI and Setting the Port Group VLAN ID with vicfg-vswitch.
   3. Add an uplink adapter. See Linking and Unlinking Uplink Adapters with ESXCLI and Linking and Unlinking Uplink Adapters with vicfg-vswitch.
   4. (Optional) Change the MTU or CDP settings. See Setting Switch Attributes with ESXCLI and Setting Switch Attributes with vicfg-vswitch.