This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
VM Port Groups
The final topic to touch on is VM port groups, which can be a bit of a struggle to understand at first. Let’s imagine that you have a huge, unconfigured virtual switch with hundreds of ports on it. Chances are, you don’t want all of the ports to be configured the same way—some of them will be used by your production VMs, others by your developers’ VMs, and even more might be for the engineering VMs.
VM port groups are a way that we can create logical rules around the virtual ports that are made available to VMs. It’s common to create a port group for each VLAN and network subnet that you want to present to your VMs. VM port groups do not provide vSphere services or require IP addresses—they are just ways to configure policy for a group of virtual ports on your vSwitch.
Figure 8.12 shows an example from our lab showing a vSwitch with a VM port group named “VM”—not very creative, sure, but it gets the point across. This is where we place our VMs, which are SQL, vCenter, and DC in this example. We’ve also disconnected one of the network adapters to show what that looks like.
)
Figure 8.12 An example vSwitch with a VM port group named “VM”
You can also see our VMkernel port named “Management” just below the VM port group. It looks a lot like a VM port group, and that might be confusing at first. Don’t worry, though—vCenter won’t let you put a VM onto the “Management” VMkernel port.