In Part 1 of this series we described the different layers of networking. We already briefly spoke about Network Pools and that both a vApp Networks and Org Networks consume a segment out of a pool. In order to fully understand vCD (VMware vCloud Director) networking we will need to explain the foundation for all Cloud Internal traffic first which [...]

After my introduction on vCD last week, I thought it was time to publish an article on Networking. Networking is most likely the most complex concept of vCD(VMware vCloud Director) and can at times be very confusing. I have created three articles which will explain the concepts of networking within vCD and of course will explain on a technical level [...]

I was reviewing a document today and noticed something that I’ve seen a couple of times already. I already wrote about Active/Standby set ups for etherchannels a year ago but this is a slight different variant. Frank also wrote a more extensive article on it a while and I just want to re-stress this. Scenario: Two NICs 1 Etherchannel of 2 links [...]

One of my customers experienced high CPU load on their physical switch. After some investigation they noticed broadcasts packets being sent every two seconds. The first reaction was Beacon Probing is probably enabled. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. But VMware GSS came to the rescue and pointed us towards a KB article. Apparently a bug has been identified in 4.0 which [...]

I am just wondering if I am the only one who doesn’t understand this. I had a discussion with our vDS team around changing the dvPortgroup settings. This can only been done after the dvPortgroup has been created. On top of that it gets created with standard values of which some don’t really follow my general best practices. (For instance [...]

One of my colleagues today asked me if it was possible to use VLAN ID 4095 for the “management” network of ESXi. This VLAN ID is however reserved for a very specific purpose. This particular VLAN ID is only to be used for “Virtual Guest Tagging” (VGT). It basically means that the VLAN ID is stripped off at the Guest [...]

I had a discussion with one of my readers last week and just read this post on the VMTN community which triggered this article. When you create a highly available environment take into account that you will need to have enough vSwitch ports available when a failover needs to occur. By default a vSwitch will be created with 56 ports [...]