VCP6-DCV Section 2: Configure and Administer Advanced vSphere 6.x Networking

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Section 2 of the VCP6-DCV blueprint

Objective 2.1: Configure Advanced Policies/Features and Verify Network Virtualization Implementation

vDS requires Enterprise+ licensing. It provides a central point of management of networking for all hosts, providing a consistent network config across hosts. 
vDS cannot traverse datacenters, IE; Datacenter One vDS cannot communicate to VMs in Datacenter Two.
Allows for Multiple VLANing in Port Groups, and Private VLANs, 
Traffic Shaping inbound and outbound traffic.
Supports Port Mirroring, NetFLow, LLDP, LACP, NIOC.

  1. Create/Delete a vSphere Distributed Switch
    • Home -> Networking -> Right click on Datastore -> Distributed Switch -> New Distributed Switch
    • Give it a name, location, version (6.0), assign uplinks if any, set Network IO control if any, create default Port Group
    • To Delete, RIght click and Delete, Will have to remove any uplinks and migrate Port Groups that exist on that vDS
  2. Add/Remove ESXi Hosts from a vSphere Distributed Switch
    • Add
      • Home -> Networking -> Right click on your vDS -> Add and Manage Hosts
      • Add Hosts -> Click the Add Button and add your appropriate host
      • Choose what you'd like to manage, at a minimum you will have to choose, Manage Physical Adapters. 
      • Choose Physical Adapters and click assign uplink,
      • Add any other options you chose before.
    • Remove
      • Home -> Networking -> Right click on your vDS -> Add and Manage Hosts
      • Select Remove hosts option
      • Select the Hosts you would like to remove.
  3. Add/Configure/Remove dvPort groups
    • Add
      • Home -> Networking -> Right click on your vDS -> Distributed Port Group -> New Distributed Port Group
      • Give it a Name
      • Select Port Binding type and Port allocation type
      • Enter number of Ports for the dvPort group
      • Select the Network resource pool
      • Select VLAN type and any other options
    • Configure
      • Home -> Networking -> Right click on your vDS Port Group -> Edit Settings
      • On this window you can configure, General, Advanced, Security, Traffic Shaping, VLAN, Teaming and Failover, Monitoring, Traffic filtering and marking.
    • Remove
      • Home -> Networking -> Right click on your vDS Port Group -> Delete
  4. Add/Remove uplink adapters to dvUplink groups
    • Add
      • Home -> Networking -> Right click on your vDS Port Group -> Edit Settings
      • Top Left, select Teaming and Failover
        • Any uplinks that you want to be used by dvPort group need to be listed under Active uplinks or Standby. Otherwise those listed under unused ones will not be used.
  5. Configure vSphere Distributed Switch general and dvPort group settings
    • Home -> Networking -> Right click on your vDS -> Settings -> Edit Settings
    • Configure name, number of uplinks, enable/disable NIOC, and advanced items such as MTU and discovery protocol.
  6. Create/Configure/Remove virtual adapters
    • Create
      • Home -> Hosts and Clusters -> Select Host -> 
      • Click on Manage -> Networking -> VMKernal adapters
      • Click Add Host Networking button (Add Button) -> VMKernal Network Adapter -> Existing Network
      • Choose form list of IP settings
      • Choose services from lis tof available services, check those services you want for the virtual adapter.
      • Pick static IP or DHCP
    • Configure
      • Select the VMKernal adapter you want to configure, and click Edit Settings button
      • Change desired Settings
    • Remove
      • Select VMKernal Adapter you want to delete, 
      • Click Remove existing Adapter button, 
  7. Migrate virtual machines to/from a vSphere Distributed Switch
    • Home -> Networking -> right click on distributed switch you want to migrate -> Migrate VM to another Network
    • Browse to select the Source and the Destination Network.
    • On the Virtual machine selection window you can select one or more VMs and their Network adapters.
  8. Configure LACP on vDS given design parameters
    • Things to consider
      • The Link Aggregation Group (LAG) you create on the distributed switch must have a minimum of two ports.
      • The number of physical uplinks that participate in the LAG must match the number of physical ports configured in the corresponding LACP port channel on the physical switch
      • The hashing algorithm on the LAG must match the hashing algorithm on the LACP port channel on the physical switch
    • Before you begin ensure you've created the LACP port channel on the physical switch
    • Home -> Networking -> Right click Distributed switch -> Manage -> LACP
    • Click on the Add button, enter in the name, number of ports, the Mode (LAG, Active Passive), Load Balancing mode (Same as you did on the LACP)
  9. Describe vDS Security Polices/Settings
    • One feature that can be configured on the vDS itself is Private VLANs, the upstream physical switch must also support PVLANs as well.
    • On distributed Port Groups there are security policies that can be configured.
    • Policy exceptions for distributed port groups are:
      • Promiscuous Mode: When set to accept, allows for network traffic within a particular port group to be seen by all virtual machines attached to that distributed port group and not just the traffic destined for a particular VM
      • MAC Address Changes: When set to accept, Allows the effective MAC Address to a VM to be something other than the original source MAC. When set to reject, all traffic is dropped when the MAC does not match the source.
      • Forged Transmits: When enabled, allow you to change the MAC address from within the OS and still allow traffic. When set to reject the source MAC is compared to the effective MAC of the network adapter and dropped if it doesn't match.
  10. Configure dvPort group blocking policies
    • Home -> Networking -> right click on dvGroup -> Edit Settings
    • Miscellaneous,
    • Change dropdown for block all ports to Yes. This will stop all VM traffic on the DVPORT group
  11. Configure load balancing and failover policies
    • Home -> Networking -> Right click on the dvPort you want to change -> Edit Settings
    • Click Teaming and failover
    • Select an option for the Load Balancing
      • Route based on originating port ID: This setting will select a physical uplink based on originating port where the traffic first entered the vDS
      • Route based on IP hash: This setting will select a physical uplink based on a hash produced using the source and destination IP address.
      • Route based on Source MAC Hash: Same as IP hash, but with MAC addresses
      • Use explicit failover: This setting will use the first physical uplink listed under active uplinks
      • Route based on physical NIC load: This setting will route traffic to active uplinks based on load of each individual active uplink.
    • Choose to notify switches upstream, allows upstream switches to update their lookup tables whenever a failover event occurs
    • Choose Yes or No for a Failback policy, Yes will initiate a failback when a failed physical adapter that comes back online. Choose No will not fail traffic back to a failed physical adapter. 
    • Failover order has three options:
      • Active Uplinks: Physical adapters listed here are active and being used for inbound/outbound traffic, adapters are chosen by a load balancing algorithm, they will always be used when they are connected.
      • Standby Uplinks: Physical adapters here are for standby purposes, standby uplinks will only be used when an active adapter fails.
      • Unused Uplinks: Physical adapters listed here will not be used
  12. Configure VLAN/PVLAN settings for VMs given communication requirements
    • Home -> Networking -> Right click dvPort group -> Edit Settings
    • Click VLAN -> VLAN Type
      • None: No VLAN tagging will be sued
      • VLAN: The specified VLAN will be the only VLAN allowed on the dvPort group
      • VLAN Trunking: Enter a range of VLANs here, All VLANs within the specified range will be allowed on this dvPort group
      • Private VLAN: Select the private VLAN you want ot use. The Private VLAN needs to be created prior to configuring the dvPort group to use the private VLAN 
  13. Configure traffic shaping policies
    • Traffic Shaping is configured per dvPort group and not at the distributed switch level. Traffic shaping can be applied to both ingress and egress traffic 
    • Home -> Networking -> Right click on the dvPort group -> Edit Settings
    • Traffic Shaping 
      • Status: Enabled or Disabled
      • Set Average Bandwidth, Peak Bandwidth, and Burst size.
  14. Enable TCP Segmentation Offload support for a virtual machine
    • TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) is supported for VMKernal adapters and virtual machines.
    • By default, TSO is enabled for VMXNET2 and VMXNET3 network adapters
    • Enabling on a Linux machine
      • Using a VMXNET adapter, 
      • Enable by cmd, 'ethtool -K ethXX tso on'
      • Disable by cmd, 'ethtool -K ethXX tso off'
    •  Enabling Windows Machine
      • Using VMXNET adapter
      • In Network Adapter properties click Configure -> Advanced
      • Set the Large Send Offload V2 (IPv4) and (IPv6) to enable dor disabled.
      • restart
  15. Enable Jumbo Frames support on appropriate components
    • Needs to be setup from end to end, both in VM world and on the Physical Adapters.
    • Home -> Networking -> Select distributed switch click Manage -> Settings
    • Properties -> Edit -> Advanced
    • Change MTU to 9000
  16. Recognize behavior of vDS Auto-Rollback

  17. Configure vDS across multiple vCenter Servers to support [Long Distance vMotion]

  18. Compare and contrast vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) capabilities



Objective 2.2: Configure Network I/O Control (NIOC)
  1. Define NIOC
    • Network I/O Control (NIOC) gives you the ability to reserve network resources for a VM across the switch (v3) in v2 network resources are reserved for a VM on the physical adapter. NIOC v3 introduces resource management for system traffic such as Fault Tolerance.
  2. Explain NIOC capabilities
    • Has ability to do IEEE 802.1p tagging on outbound packets
    • Utilize load-based teaming for uplinks on a particular vDS
    • Can do traffic isolation
    • Can enforce traffic bandwidth limits across uplinks on the vDS
    • Can do network partitioning using share mechanism. Similar to shares for compute resources.
    • Separate traffic into network resource pools. NIOC comes with pre-defined network resource pools
      • ISCSI
      • NFS
      • VM Traffic
      • vMotion
      • vSphere Replication
      • FT Logging
      • Management Traffic
  3. Configure NIOC shares/limits based on VM requirements

  4. Explain the behavior of a given NIOC setting

  5. Determine Network I/O Control requirements
    • NIOC v2 has the following requirements
      • for distributed switch version 5.1 ESXi can be 5.1 or greater
      • for distributed switch version 5.5 ESXi can be 5.5 or greater
    • NIOC v3 can only run on a distributed switch v6.0 and can only have ESXi version 6.0
    • SR-IOV isn't available on VM's using NIOC v3
    • If you upgraded the distributed switch to version 6.0, but didn't upgrade NIOC from NIOC v2 to NIOC v3 then you must,
      • Ensure your running distributed switch has been upgraded to version 6.0
      • Ensure that all hosts that are part of the distributed switch are in a connected state.
    • NIOC requires Enterprise+ licensing
  6. Differentiate Network I/O Control capabilities

  7. Enable/Disable Network I/O Control
    • Home -> Networking -> Right click on vDS -> Settings -> Edit Settings
    • From Dropdown next to Network I/O control select Enabled/Disabled.
  8. Monitor Network I/O Control
    • There are a few ways you can monitor NIOC, first is to look at your bandwidth capacity, what's reserved vs what's available for your system traffic.
    • Home -> Networking -> Select distributed switch the has NIOC enabled and to monitor, 
    • Click Resource Allocation -> System Traffic
    • Here you will see a line graph showing you your total bandwidth capability
    • Click Network resource pools,
    • Here you will see the configured reservation and the granted quota and unused quota.
(Not in Blueprint) Objective 2.3 - Configure vSS and vDS Policies
  1. Identify common vSS and vDS policies
    • The vSS and vDS have some similarities and overlap. Some policies are one for one, while others, while similar, have different feature sets. Here are a list of common policies that exist within the vSS and the vDS.
    • Common Policies:
      • Security – applies to both vSS and vDS
        • Policy exceptions include Promiscuous Mode, MAC Address Changes and Forged Transmits
      • Traffic Shaping – can be applied to outbound traffic only on the vSS and can be applied to both outbound and inbound traffic on the vDS
        • Policy exceptions include Average Bandwidth (Kbits/sec), Peak Bandwidth (Kbits/sec) and Burst Size (Kbytes/sec)
      • Teaming and Failover – applies to both vSS and vDS port groups
        • Policies include Load Balancing, Network Failure Detection, Notify Switches, Failback and Failback
      • There are quite a few other policies that apply to the vDS that do not apply to the vSS. Some of these policies include
        • Network I/O Control
        • Port Mirroring
        • Net Flow
        • Private VLANs

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