Understand Microsoft Distributed Switch as a VMware Admin Point of View

For a long time we were waiting to upgrade our Hyper-v 2.0 environment to 3.0 and its good to wait until SCVMM and Windows 2012 R2 version become alive , i guess in a short period SCVMM 2012 R2 will be ready for production. When i test the features its still in Preview.

When you start to create your own environment you will see that VMware site, you are creating the object which is vDS and start to play with it’s properties, on Microsoft site you will create properties and start to associate with each other to create vDS.

Also you will see that Microsoft strategy is still same give everything without extra purchase , if you read this article you will see that compare is focused on require additional things to purchase or not !

Lets start ;

Distributed Switches ;

Microsoft call it “Logical Switch” and its newly supported with SCVMM 2012 R2 release.

VMware point of view vDS = Logical Switch

Resource Allocation ;

Some of Microsoft MVPs call it Converged Fabric, but as for me i can not say its converged, its kind of QoS/Traffic Classification because as for me Converge Networking is mixing the SAN and Ethernet networks but its depend and very  elastic word.

vNIC is used for classification of traffic like below , you can see that i divided management, live migration , Cluster networks also you can add many more for a new start of Microsoft SMB 3.0 for iscsi network too !

This is very similar HP FlexNIC or IBM vNIC which is Emulex technology but they are limited to max 4 logical nics per one physical 10G interface, of course Microsoft give you more and i guess this is plan or way of the software defined networking and gap is still many admins or designer think to offload such process then you need other vendors like Qlogic, Broadcom , Emulex ….

Also need to bandwidth limiting , isolating traffics from each other to do it you need a virtual port profile Microsoft point of view and assign this each port profile to vNIC. Older versions of SCVMM its Native Port Profile.

VMware point of view  vDS Resource Allocation = vNIC + Port Profile via Port Classification

Teaming ;

For teaming you need to create a Uplink Port Profile, you have to choose Load Balancing Algorithm and Teaming mode and you will use it when create a logical switch and choose the physical NICs which you would like to apply this profile. Check again Resource Allocation section.

VMware point of view dvUplinks = Uplink port profile

3rd Party vSwitch Support ;

Here Microsoft said that we are supporting extensions not replacing the their virtual switch.

To Compare little ;

On Microsoft Site there is no port group, no distributed port group , i couldn’t see it until now !

Traffic Shaping point of view , because of port group option available on VMware , it is easy to apply a policy port group based, on Microsoft site it should be scripted with PowerShell because you have to configure bandwith management per each VM, per each virtual nic step by step.

Microsoft said that Network Virtualization included based on NVGRE and Site to Site NVGRE Gateway, on VMware site need to purchase NSX

Also Microsoft included the IP Address management inside the SCVMM

Please read this articles ;

How to set bandwith limits for Hyper-v VMs ?

Hyper-v Converged Fabric ?

QoS Common Configuration ?

NIC Teaming,Hyper-v Switch, QoS and Actual Performance ?

Not almost but have an idea about Microsoft Network Virtualization but first i have to check NSX and then i will have another article for NV.

VM