The VMware VMkernel networking interface provides network connectivity for the host, and handles VMware vMotion, traffic management, and fault tolerance. Management Traffic—Enables the management traffic for the host and VMware vCenter server. A VMkernel adapter is typically created when the ESXi software is installed.
VMware ESX and VMware ESXi are hypervisors that use software to abstract processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines (VMs). ESX hosts are the servers/data storage devices on which the ESX or ESXi hypervisor has been installed.
Creating a VMkernel port and enabling vMotion on an ESXi/ESX host (2054994)
- Log into the vCenter Server using vSphere Client.
- Click to select the host.
- Click the Configuration tab.
- Click Networking under Hardware.
- Click Add Networking.
- Select VMkernel and click Next.
The answer from a VMkernel perspective is unlimited. The real limits are those imposed in the vSphere 5.1 Configuration Maximums guide being: 256 port groups per standard switch (if applicable) 1050 active ports per host (VDS and VSS)
- System Traffic Qualifier.
- MAC Traffic Qualifier.
- IP Traffic Qualifier.
Port groups allow us to logically carve up our virtual ports that are available on a particular vSwitch. We can apply traffic policy rules at the port group level – security rules and traffic shaping. Port groups are where we can also assign VLANs to our traffic.
VMkernel is a virtualization interface between a Virtual Machine and the ESXi host which stores VMs. It is responsible to allocate all available resources of ESXi host to VMs such as memory, CPU, storage etc.
Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) process - A process that runs in the VMkernel that is responsible for virtualizing the guest OS instructions, and manages memory. The VMM passes storage and network I/O requests to the VMkernel, and passes all other requests to the VMX process.
The VMkernel Networking Layer allows you to connect to the host. In addition, it processes the system traffic of IP storage, vSphere vMotion, vSAN, Fault Tolerance, and others. Similar VMkernel adapters can be created and used on the source and target vSphere Replication hosts to isolate replication data traffic.
The VMkernel of ESXi boots directly on the hardware and does not need a Linux OS anymore.
VMware allows creating a maximum of 256 (vmk0 - vmk255) vmkernel interfaces on an ESXi host. The use cases include interfaces for management traffic, VMotion traffic, FT traffic, Virtual SAN traffic, iSCSI, and NAS interfaces.
clicking the Administration button at the top and then selecting the System Logs tab, as shown in Figure 10.1. Here you can select between the various log files, search for log entries, and control how many of the log entries display. The following log files are available on an ESX host: I VMkernel, /var/log/vmkernel.
A VMware snapshot is a copy of the virtual machine's disk file (VMDK) at a given point in time. Snapshots provide a change log for the virtual disk and are used to restore a VM to a particular point in time when a failure or system error occurs. Snapshots alone do not provide backup.
VMware High Availability (HA) allows companies to provide high availability to any application running in a virtual machine. With VMware HA IT organizations can: • Protect applications with no other failover option. Provide cost-effective high availability for any application running in a virtual machine.
The big difference between a Virtual Machine port group and a VMkernel port group is the type of traffic it is passing. As you can see, a VMkernel port is passing traffic specific to VMware vSphere. A virtual machine port group is just passing your garden variety virtual machine traffic.
In short, port group definitions capture all the settings for a switch port. In VMware Infrastructure, they are called uplinks, and the virtual ports connected to them are called uplink ports. A single host may have a maximum of uplinks, which may be on one switch or distributed among a number of switches.
VMKernel Port: Provisioning TCP/IP StackSupports the traffic for virtual machine cold migration, cloning, and snapshot migration.
vmnic = A real phyiscal interface on an ESX host. vmknic = virtual network interface that is used by the VMKernel. veth = nothing, this isn't a real term, but it's probably the same thing as vswif. vswif = The virtual ethernet interface that is used by the service console.
What is disk provisioning in VMware? When you create or provision a VMware Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine data is stored inside a virtual hard disk. It is a virtual construct representing a physical disk.
Cold migration is the migration of powered off or suspended virtual machines between hosts across clusters, data centers, and vCenter Server instances. By using cold migration, you can also move associated disks from one datastore to another.
The only thing that you really need is the default gateway for the vMotion TCP/IP stack. This can be found by browsing to the Host > Manage > Network > TCP/IP configuration and editing the vMotion TCP/IP stack.
vSphere Standard Switch is used to provide network connectivity for hosts, virtual machines and to handle VMKernel Traffic. Networking vMotion is not available in standard switch. vSphere Distributed switch. vSphere Distributed switch allows a single virtual switch to connect multiple Esxi hosts.
After you enable the ESXi Shell in the direct console, you can use these below combination of ALT + Function keys to access the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) of an ESXi host: ALT+F1 = Switches to the console. ALT+F2 = Switches to the DCUI. ALT+F11 = Returns to the banner screen.
