From the course: VMware vSphere 8 Certified Technical Associate - Data Center Virtualization (VCTA-DCV) (1V0-21.20) Cert Prep

vSphere Standard Switches: Multiple TCP/IP stacks - vSphere Tutorial

From the course: VMware vSphere 8 Certified Technical Associate - Data Center Virtualization (VCTA-DCV) (1V0-21.20) Cert Prep

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vSphere Standard Switches: Multiple TCP/IP stacks

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- [Rick] In this video, we'll learn how to use multiple TCP/IP stacks for different types of traffic. And so first, let's start by explaining what is A TCP/IP stack? Well, vSphere does support multiple TCP/IP stacks, and each TCP/IP stack is going to have different networking information, like, for example, a different default gateway or a different set of DNS servers. So for example, I could have a default gateway that's used when traffic is bound for some network. And so let's say you go into your computer and you're running the Windows operating system and you type in www.trainertests.com in your browser, and that traffic is bound for some address on the internet. And so that traffic needs to hit some device in your network that's capable of routing that traffic to the internet, and that's your default gateway. So anytime traffic is bound for a different IP range than your own computer is on, or a different layer two segment or the internet, it's got to go through your default gateway. And you may have machines in your network that need to use different networks for different things. And so in that case, you might need different default gateways and different TCP/IP stacks. So the default TCP/IP stack is built right into your ESXI host, and it's used for all management traffic, all vMotion traffic, basically all of the system traffic that your ESXI host generates. Now we're not talking about virtual machine traffic here, we're talking about traffic that is being generated by our VM kernal ports. So things like vMotion and management, those are all going to flow through the default TCP/IP stack. But you may want to use a different network, you may want to use a separate TCP/IP stack for things like vMotion, for example. This is useful if I want to point all of my vMotion traffic to some other network. So for example, let's say you plan on doing a lot of long distance vMotions, migrating virtual machines across large geographic distances. You may have a specific network that you want to use for that. And so giving vMotion its own dedicated TCP/IP stack allows you to direct vMotion traffic to a different default gateway or a different DNS server than your default TCP/IP stack. We can set up a provisioning TCP/IP stack. So for doing things like cold migrations and snapshots, we can send that traffic through its own dedicated TCP/IP stack. We can do cloning, cold migration snapshots, that's what the provisioning TCP/IP stack is used for. And then there's also a custom TCP/IP stack. We can create our own custom TCP/IP stacks and associate the VM kernel ports that we create with those custom TCP/IP stacks.

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