Network monitoring and management

For complete network monitoring, you need to complement vSphere with another tool. vSphere does not provide protocol analysis functionality, which is instead available through a packet analyzer or sniffer program, such as Wireshark and Netflow Logic. With vSphere alone, you will not know, for example, which VMs are talking to which VMs, what kind of latency they experience, and what protocols are traveling in your network. At the time of writing, there is also no management pack for vRealize Operations that provides network protocol analysis. This means you need to have two consoles for complete network monitoring. NetFlow Logic is developing a new management pack, which you can follow up at https://www.netflowlogic.com/products/for-vmware/.

vSphere 5.5 provides an enhancement for capturing network packets. The previous tool, tcpdump-uw, did not let you capture packets at points such as virtual port and switch. The new tool, pktcap-uw, can capture at any...