Jul 2017

If you are like me, and used earlier versions of VMWare (ver4) then version 6 might be a little confusing when it comes to the networking architecture. When I used to use older versions of VMWare (never used vCenter) you just as signed a physical interface to a VM. While you can still do this, it's not as obvious how to do it.

Consider my example below, I three servers, all connected to a switch, and I am passing multicast traffice between them, that is being processed in a particular way at each stage. Basically I want an input, two processing stages, a storage device and an output.


Each server (VM) has three interfaces, Management, Data In and Data Out. The reality is that for this example, on my physical server I will be using only two physical interfaces, one for management and one for data.

However, to be able to share and manage these interfaces, we need to create some Virtual Switches, and Port Groups. Now we could just create one port group and assign that group to all of the data interfaces, but this is not a real world use case, and it limits our flexibility.

Look at the diagram below.