Hello,
I'm hoping someone could clarify some points for me regarding vSphere Distributed Switches. I'm relatively new to the vSphere and this is purely for my own understanding, so any replies will be appreciated. The training materials I've looked through show the configuration and give an overview of the concept, but I'm still struggling to get things clear in my mind as to the logic of how it's working.
I understand that the vDS is purely a management object - that it manages the physical uplinks for x number of ESXi hosts for centralised configuration. I understand that when adding a host to the switch, you associate the physical nics of that host to an uplink on the DS. I think I'm struggling to understand the logic behind the uplink/physical nic association. I apologise if the questions below seem a little stupid - they're in no particular order, just things I'm trying to get straight in my thoughts.
In the training videos I watched, port groups are configured on the vDS for the management interfaces, vMotion, virtual machine networks etc. The management interfaces of the 3 hosts added to the switch were all added to the "management" port group and NICs associated with uplinks 1 and 2. Firstly, is there a limit as to how many NICs or hosts an individual uplink on the vDS can manage? Could another host be added and have uplinks 1 and 2 on the vDS associated with it's vmotion interfaces instead of the management? Would this still work? Or do the NICs associated with the individual uplinks on the DS all need to be consistent - ie, on the same subnet? How does the uplink/nic association work?
With regards to configuring NIC teaming for the port groups on the vDS, I've seen it configured differently on the 2 x training videos I've watched. On the first, each port group on the vDS used all available uplinks. On the second, the individual port groups only used the uplinks associated with their physical NICs - this makes sense to me. In the first example, how could this possibly work? I'm obviously missing something somewhere with the whole concept of how this works!
If someone could clarify this whole concept for me (or point me in the right direction) it would really be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Matt