Viewing the Virtual Switch Inventory in a Virtual Network
Using virtual switches, virtual machines on the different hosts can communicate with each other using the same protocols that would be used over physical switches, without the need for any additional networking hardware. Once you have discovered a VMware vCenter in Network Director, the hosts, virtual machines and virtual switches also come under the Network Director management. You can use the View virtual switch inventory task to view details of all the virtual switches in your virtual network infrastructure.
To view the virtual switch Inventory:
- While in Build mode with Virtual view selected, click the Virtual Center for which you want to view the virtual switch inventory details. From the Tasks pane, click View Virtual Switches from the Inventory menu to open the View Virtual Switches page.
- The virtual switch inventory table displays the details
for all the virtual switches in the Network. Table 1 describes the fields
in this table:
Table 1: Manage Virtual Switches Page Field Descriptions
Field
Description
Name
Name assigned to the virtual switch.
If it is a standalone virtual switch, the hostname on which the vSwitch resides is also displayed.
Version
Indicates the vSphere version.
Type
The type of virtual switch. The switch type can be:
- Standalone vSwitch—The traditional virtual switch where the administrator configures and maintains a virtual switch for each host.
- Distributed vSwitch— A distributed switch spans multiple hosts at the virtual network level. It is created by abstracting individual host-level virtual switches into a single large distributed switch. This considerably simplifies the virtual machine networking by enabling you to set up virtual machine access switching for your entire datacenter from a centralized interface.
MTU
Maximum Transmission Unit—The maximum size of a protocol data unit that can be transmitted.
Number of Ports
Total number of ports held in the port groups configured for this switch.
LLDP Status
Indicates if Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) is enabled on the given virtual switch.
LLDP Operation
If LLDP is enabled, this field indicates the LLDP operation mode. The operation mode can be one of the following:
- Listen—Detects and displays information about the associated physical switch port, but information about the vSphere distributed switch is not available to the physical switch.
- Advertise—Makes information about the vSphere distributed switch available to the physical switch, but does not detect and display information about the physical switch.
- Both—Detects and displays information about the associated physical switch and makes information about the vSphere distributed switch available to the physical switch.
- Not applicable–Indicates that LLDP is not enabled.
Note: If you plan to use the Orchestration and Topology features extensively, then we recommend that you set the LLDP operation mode to Both.
