VMware vSphere networking essentials

VMware vSphere is the largest and most powerful server virtualization suite used across the globe. It is a stepping stone to software-defined datacenters that use the VMware vCD or your own defined cloud-based datacenter. The VMware vSphere suite provides the flexibility and reliability to compute resources by merging available resources and converting them into an aggregated pool of resources. It has a proven record of high availability, scalability (on demand), fault tolerance, and security. The VMware vSphere suite seamlessly provides vCompute, vStorage, and the vNetwork virtualization layer for aggregated physical resources to operate across datacenters. The following diagram illustrates this flexibility across datacenters:

The VMware vSphere virtual switch works in a manner similar to the network layer 2 physical switch. Before we begin with the virtual switch network, let's first look at the networking Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model...