Networking for VMware Administrators

Foreword

Virtual networking has long been the Cinderella of server virtualization, as anyone reading VMware release notes can easily attest—with every new vSphere release, we get tons of new CPU/RAM optimization features, high availability improvements, better storage connectivity, and networking breadcrumbs.

The traditional jousting between networking and virtualization vendors and the corresponding lack of empathy between virtualization and networking teams in large IT shops definitely doesn’t help. Virtualization vendors try to work around the traditional networking concepts (pretending, for example, that Spanning Tree Protocol [STP] and Link Aggregation Groups [LAG] don’t exist), while routinely asking for mission-impossible feats such as ...