vSphere 4.0 vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) – Video Demonstration + Architecture Diagram

Posted on 10th October 2009
Posted by Hany Michael Categorized Under: Tutorials, VMware, vSphere Comments

A Boring Introduction:

It's been a crazy week! A lot of stuff is happening right now at my work, personal life, and my career. For example, I'm building our much-awaited "Private Cloud" at work, using both the ultimate vSphere Cloud OS and the rock-solid IBM hardware that was finally delivered this week. But wait, this is not 'the' exciting thing that was happing this week for me, it's most definitely the news that I've received last Thursday about winning the first round of the vSphere blogging contest. I will not thank John Troyer & Mike Adams for their great idea and their incredible efforts for organizing this contest, and I will not thank Deepak Narain, the man behind this blog existence who kept pushing me to lunch it a year back (more on this soon), I will, instead, thank everyone for their kind words and encouragement (including the names I've just mentioned), I was literally thrilled by the emails, blog posts and "tweets" that were thrown at me since the news was out. THANK YOU!

Now, enough of this boring talk about me, myself and I, and let's get started with this new round of the blogging contest. A heads up first: I was not supposed to participate this week since I've been so busy as you see, but I had a 24 hours after canceling some plans that I had at the last minute. That said, what you see here is not quite final, I believe I need to work more on the diagram especially the IO plane layout in the hidden vSS, and probably add a couple of more configurations to the video to show some cool stuff like the consistent network stats of a mobile VM jumping from an ESX to another. I'll be updating all these stuff hopefully during next week.

The Configuration Video:

 

The Architecture Diagram:

Another vSphere diagram! I told you, you are going to see these blueprints more than any time before. Quick notes:

  • This is an A3 scale diagram in case you want to print it.
  • The diagram reflects the exact configuration on the video. I've done this intentionally to make it easier and faster for any one new to the vDS to understand the concept and the various configuration aspects.
  • As I mentioned above, due to the very short period of time that I had, I will most probably modify small parts in the diagram to achieve better results. You can come back and check the version number of the diagram to download the latest updates.

MASTER IT!

I love this part at the end of any book/chapter published by SYBEX. It gets down and dirty with all the theoretic parts covered, and guide you through a practical path to try what you've learned. This is what I want to do here as well. The vDS is quite confusing as a concept and configuration for the first time, and I personally didn't get it except when I started getting my hands on it and playing around with the configurations. The challenge here is that you probably won't have the required lab to do this, especially that you need large number of NICs to test all the configurations. If you are one of my regular blog readers, you've probably guessed what I'm getting to. It's the "vSphere in a box"!

Around three month back, I published a series of posts talking about building a vSphere configurations using ESX inside itself. Instead of rewriting the whole story again, here is the links for your consideration. One last thing to note here: the entire lab you've seen in the video was built using Lab Manager 4.0 as you will read in the following posts.

Special Thanks:

I'd like to thank Duncan Epping for reviewing part of the contents here. I was having some doubts about few points and due to the time constrain, I didn't have the time to research more on them. I asked for Duncan's help and he was very kind to do so.

Additional Recourses:

These are the best resources that I've found so far for the vDS:

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« Related posts: »

  1. » vSphere 4.0 Fault Tolerance (Architecture Diagram, Video and Use Cases)
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  3. » vSphere In A Box: (Part 3): The Lab Manager 4.0 Automation
  4. » vSphere In A Box: Part(2): Putting the pieces all together
  5. » Video: vSphere4 Unleashed: 01 – Installing ESX4.0
  • Hey, Hany

    The level gots high for the other poor bloggers.... Not me, but the others...-:)) I'm not participating on vDS, because haven't done yet.

    Not only text, but Video and Diagrams used.... wow... not every blogger has the skills to achieve those fancy diagrams like this, especially when the name of the tool is kept secret... -:)

    For the moment.... I take my hat off (Chapeau bas in Fr)....

    I'll be back as a blooger for VMware Data Recovery...
  • Thanks Vladan :) .. I’m not keeping an secrets, I’m only using MS-Visio2007, but for some reason no one believes that ;)
    I look forward to your participation in the next round, your VDR videos are awesome and you are already a winner as far as I’m concerned!

    Good luck, and thanks again.
  • WOW another great post!
    Looks like you give the best of yourself under pressure...
    Keep on with these high quality posts mate. MS Visio rulez :D
    Cheers,
  • Thanks for the nice comment :)
    Visio is indeed a great tool for illustrating these kind of technical stuff…stay tuned for more ;)
  • Alex Lee
    Nice Work!

    We'll starting to work on vDS too! Looking forward to more of your entries.

    How about the Management Network? Do you create another vDS or do you try to have it on vSS only?

    Thanks

    -----
    Alex
  • Hi Alex,

    Good question! I don’t put the management network on vDS because I may lose my ability to control/modify it if my vCenter Server is gone. I don’t think VMware has anything official on this point (or even a best practice), but I’ve seen many bloggers bring this point up on similar blog posts (like Duncan Epping & Jason Boche).

    Regards,
  • Suresh
    GR8 post
  • Alex Lee
    Hi Hany,

    You are absolutely right on that part. I had some trouble taking back control of my host once I lost connection to my host by moving the management console over to vDS.

    After review the whole design of the vDS and having a better understanding of the the new technology. It makes a lot of sense to split up the different services. VM Network should be one vDS. FT+VMotion should maybe have it own vDS. and vSS should be only for management. What I don't really get is why do you have multiple VMkernel Ports for VMotion and FT? vmk1:192.168.10.1, 192.168.10.2, and 192.168.10.3. Does this improve the performance?

    Also, my understanding is the vSphere 4 has improve the Network performance in general by a lot does this this mean for vSS or vDS? I would imagine that vDS would be slower overall because it need to keep track of the traffic and there could be more overhead since it's being managed by the vCenter side.

    I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

    BTW nice diagrams, which program did you used to make them? Their really cool! I would like to generate my own and maybe I can send you what I have.


    Thanks

    -----
    Alex
  • Alex Lee
    "What I don’t really get is why do you have multiple VMkernel Ports for VMotion and FT? vmk1:192.168.10.1, 192.168.10.2, and 192.168.10.3. Does this improve the performance?"

    I know why NOW! these are the VMkernel Port assigned to each ESX HOST, hence the different ip address assignment.

    Thanks

    -----
    Alex
  • Hi Alex,

    The reason why I made deferent VMkernel portgroups for VMotion & FT was to dedicate deferent uplinks for them. It is highly recommended by VMware to dedicate at least 1Gbps links for FT (better 10GbE) due to the extensive BW it uses for the logging traffic.

    Please also note one important thing, you can’t have more than 16 vDS per an entire vCenter server! This is kind of a limitation for the time being IMHO, so you must use your vDSs wisely.

    I use MS Visio 2007 for my diagrams. Mainly using basic block shapes – Glad you liked them :)

    Regards,
  • Alex Lee
    Hi Hany,

    Thanks for letting me know that there is a limit to the vDS for the entire vCenter server.

    Do you think it makes any sense to put everything is one vDS? Would this simplify things or do you recommend having different vDS for each services.

    Also what's your take on the Nexus 1000 switch? Is it a buy? or just use the vSphere Enterprise Plus with the vDS.

    Thanks

    -----
    Alex
  • Hello again,

    The only thing that would worry me about putting everything on one vDS is security. I have to dig deep into this topic before I can give any opinion about it.

    It depends on the customer requirements whether to use the Cisco Nexus 1000V or the native vDS. For me, as an example, NX1V is mandatory because I need to have Netflow stats, and also to run IDS using the SPAN ports of the switches. There are a lot more features of course that comes with it, I’m just naming a few.

    Regards,
  • Alex Lee
    I was just doing a few quick test with vCenter and vDS. I noticed that if you configured the vDS switch correctly, you should not have any problems connecting to the ESX host and managing the vDS locally from there. I agree that the migration part of it can cause serious issues because you lose connect to manage the ESX host that lost it's connect. In either case, I'm going to try this single switch solution and see if there is any issues and do a few more testing.

    Thanks again Hany for your valuable input.

    -----
    Alex
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