VMWorld session review – NET2207: VMware vSphere Distributed Switch—Technical Deep Dive

This is a session you want to bookmark.  First off Jason Nash famously says that he doesn’t care if vCenter is virtual or physical just make sure you’re treating it as a Tier 1 application.  This was a great video for guys like me that are removed from the day to day of managing a VMware environment.  It helped refresh my understanding of Virtual Distributed Switches (VD).  I have to admit that I’m a big vSwitch guy.  Since most of my production experience was in VMware 4.1 there was not a lot of reasons for me to choose VDS over vSwitches.  There is a long laundry list of reasons to run VDS even in small environments versus just in large environments in vSphere 5.x.  Jason walks you through creating VDS using the vSphere Web Client.  Along the way he gives a lot of useful information that I promise you will forget.  This is a video that you’ll have to watch a few times as you walk through creating VDS in your lab.

This is a pretty good highlight for the need of virtualization professionals needing to have both server and network skill.  It’s no getting around learning networking.  VDS is fully integrated into the vSphere kernel so there is no handing this off to the network group. You might want to book mark this review to get you back to this video it’s a classic.