Setting Up Virtual Switches and Associating a Switch with a Network Interface

A virtual switch models a physical Ethernet switch. You can manage virtual switches and port groups by using the
or by using vSphere CLI commands.
You can create a maximum of 127 virtual switches on a single
host. By default, each
host has a single virtual switch called
vSwitch0
. By default, a virtual switch has 56 logical ports. See the
Configuration Maximums
document on the vSphere documentation main page for details. Ports connect to the virtual machines and the
physical network adapters.
When two or more virtual machines are connected to the same virtual switch, network traffic between them is routed locally. If an uplink adapter is attached to the virtual switch, each virtual machine can access the external network that the adapter is connected to.
This section discusses working in a standard switch environment. See Networking Using vSphere Distributed Switches for information about distributed switch environments.
When working with virtual switches and port groups, perform the following tasks.
  1. Find out which virtual switches are available and, optionally, what the associated MTU and CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) settings are. See Retrieving Information About Virtual Switches with ESXCLI and Retrieving Information About Virtual Switches with vicfg-vswitch.