A DistributedVirtualSwitch managed object is a virtual network switch that is located on a vCenter Server. A distributed virtual switch manages configuration for proxy switches (HostProxySwitch). A proxy switch is located on an ESXi host that is managed by the vCenter Server and is a member of the switch. A distributed switch also provides virtual port state management so that port state is maintained when vCenter Server operations move a virtual machine from one host to another.
A proxy switch performs network I/O to support the following network traffic and operations:
- Network traffic between virtual machines on any hosts that are members of the distributed virtual switch.
- Network traffic between a virtual machine that uses a distributed virtual switch and a virtual machine that uses a VMware standard virtual switch.
- Network traffic between a virtual machine and a remote system on a physical network connected to the ESXi host.
- vSphere system operations to support capabilities such as VMotion or High Availability.
A DistributedVirtualSwitch is the base distributed switch implementation. It supports a VMware distributed virtual switch implementation and it supports third party distributed switch implementations. The base implementation provides the following capabilities (defined in the DVSFeatureCapability object):
- NIC teaming
- Network I/O control
- Network resource allocation
- Quality of service tag support
- User-defined resource pools
- I/O passthrough (VMDirectPath Gen2)
A VmwareDistributedVirtualSwitch supports the following additional capabilities (defined in the DVSFeatureCapability and VMwareDVSFeatureCapability objects):
- Backup, restore, and rollback for a VMware distributed virtual switch and its associated portgroups.
- Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) configuration.
- Health check operations for NIC teaming and VLAN/MTU support.
- Monitoring switch traffic using Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX).
- Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP).
- Virtual network segmentation using a Private VLAN (PVLAN).
- VLAN-based SPAN (VSPAN) for virtual distributed port mirroring.
- Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) defined for uplink portgroups.
