Here we are with a very quick article on Distributed Port Groups. This is a follow up from the article showing how to create virtual Distributed Switches in vSphere. For the purpose of this article the screenshots will show the creation of a Distributed Port Group for the Management Traffic.
Of course it is possible to repeat these steps for all intended Distributed Port Group required in our environment.
In my home lab I will be creating separate Distributed Port Group for the following Network Traffic types:
On DS-Infrastructure Switch
- Management
- vMotion
- Provisioning
- VM Production
- VM External
On DS-Storage Switch
- iSCSI-01
- iSCSI-02
In particular:
- Management will use vmnic0 as Primary and vmnic32 as Fail-over Uplink
- vMotion will use vmnic32
- Provisioning will use vmnic33
- VM Production will use no Uplink. In fact this is an isolated network. Can communicate externally only through a router on a different network
- VM External will use vmnic0 just to communicate with the outside world. All the network connections are operated by a ClearOS firewall.
This is just a sample configuration and of course can change based on requirements. For example in the future the option to add vSAN specific Distributed Port Group and why not even non-routable networks we can use to segregate the Backup traffic with different settings pertaining network throughput, throttling and encryption.
As soon as we have a network topology in mind we are ready to start creating the desired Distributed Port Group!
Create Distributed Port Groups
From the virtual Distributed Switch we’ll use for Infrastructure let’s do a right click to access the menu and select the new Distributed Port Groups. Let’s provide a friendly name.
In the configuration settings we can select a wide range of options. By default new Distributed Port Groups will inherit all settings from the parent virtual Distributed Switch. For now we can accept the default settings unless we have specific requirements. For example changing the vLAN, Port allocation or any other network policy. All of them can be easily changed at any time.
And finally a summary showing the main settings for this particular Distributed Port Group.
As mentioned above the creation of Distributed Port Groups is a very easy task. Managing Distributed Port Groups from virtual Distributed Switches is a lot easier than creating Port Groups on virtual Standard Switches on each single Host. And maintaining exactly the same configurations across multiple Hosts.
Virtual Distributed Switches address all this and a lot more. We can now follow the same procedure to create the required Distributed Port Groups for our home lab depending on network topology.
I would recommend to have a separate virtual Distributed Switch for Network Storage. From a performance perspective we can get advantage of different MTU size and other settings. More to cover for separate article.
Next step will show how to manage the Physical Network Cards available to the vSphere Host.
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