Applying Networking Policies on a vSphere Standard or Distributed Switch

You apply networking policies differently on vSphere Standard Switches and vSphere Distributed Switches. Not all policies that are available for a vSphere Distributed Switch are also available for a vSphere Standard Switch.

Table 1. Virtual Switch Objects Where Policies Apply

Virtual Switch	Virtual Switch Object	Description
vSphere Standard Switch	Entire switch	When you apply policies on the entire standard switch, the policies are propagated to all standard port groups on the switch.
	Standard port group	You can apply different policies on individual port groups by overriding the policies that are inherited from the switch.
vSphere Distributed Switch	Distributed port group	When you apply policies on a distributed port group, the policies are propagated to all ports in the group.
	Distributed port	You can apply different policies on individual distributed ports by overriding the policies that are inherited from the distributed port group.
	Uplink port group	You can apply policies at uplink port group level, and the are policies are propagated to all ports in the group.
	Uplink port	You can apply different policies on individual uplink ports by overriding the policies that are inherited from the uplink port group.

Table 2. Policies Available for a vSphere Standard Switch and vSphere Distributed Switch

Policy	Standard Switch	Distributed Switch	Description
Teaming and failover	Yes	Yes	Lets you configure the physical NICs that handle the network traffic for a standard switch, standard port group, distributed port group, or distributed port. You arrange the physical NICs in a failover order and apply different load balancing policies over them.
Security	Yes	Yes	Provides protection of traffic against MAC address impersonation and unwanted port scanning. The networking security policy is implemented in Layer 2 of the networking protocol stack.
Traffic shaping	Yes	Yes	Lets you restrict the network bandwidth that is available to ports, but also to allow bursts of traffic to flow through at higher speeds. ESXi shapes outbound network traffic on standard switches and inbound and outbound traffic on distributed switches.
VLAN	Yes	Yes	Lets you configure the VLAN tagging for a standard or distributed switch. You can configure External Switch Tagging(EST), Virtual Switch Tagging (VST), and Virtual Guest Tagging (VGT).
Monitoring	No	Yes	Enables and disables NetFlow monitoring on a distributed port or port group.
Traffic filtering and marking	No	Yes	Lest you protect the virtual network from unwanted traffic and security attacks or apply a QoS tag to a certain traffic type.
Resources allocation	No	Yes	Lets you associate a distributed port or port group with a user-defined network resource pool. In this way, you can better control the bandwidth that is available to the port or port group. You can use the resource allocation policy with vSphere Network I/O Control version 2 and 3.
Port blocking	No	Yes	Lets you selectively block ports from sending and receiving data.