Administration Guide › Managing Virtual Environments › VMware vSphere and vCenter Server › Virtual Standard Switches and Virtual Distributed Switches in the vNetwork Panel › vNetwork Standard Switches (vSwitch)

vNetwork Standard Switches (vSwitch)

CA Virtual Assurance monitors policies and properties of standard vSwitches which are abstracted network devices. A vSwitch can route traffic internally between VMs and link to external networks. vSwitches combine the bandwidth of multiple network adapters and balance communications traffic among them. A vSwitch can handle physical NIC failover.

A vSwitch models a physical Ethernet switch. The default number of logical ports for a vSwitch is 120. You can connect one network adapter of a VM to each port. Each uplink adapter associated with a vSwitch uses one port. Each logical port on the vSwitch is a member of a single port group. Each vSwitch can also have one or more port groups assigned to it. When two or more VMs are connected to the same vSwitch, network traffic between them is routed locally. If an uplink adapter is attached to the vSwitch, each VM can access the external network that the adapter is connected to.

You can expand the Virtual Standard Switch objects to see the associated ports and portgroups.

• The port groups contain associated virtual machines that use the portgroup.