Question about traffic over VSwitches

[arptro]

Hello,

I am trying to understand how traffic flows between vswitches.

I have 2 vms, VM1 and VM2. Both connected to a vswitch on the VLAN100 Virtual Machine network and to VLAN200 on the ISCSi network where they reside. VM1 and VM2 reside on different LUNs on the same drive array. I am using VSphere5 with ESXi 5.1 hosts.

What traffic passes between the VLAN100 and VLAN200 network if:

1. I copy a 10G file between VM1 and VM2
2. I import a SQL database on VM1's 😧 drive into the SQL instance on VM1.

Thanks for your help.
Robert

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

I'm not quite sure whether VLAN200 in this case is connected to the ESXi host or as in-guest iSCSI to the VM directly. Anyway, since you are copying data from one VM to the other (in case 1), the traffic between the VMs will use VLAN100 and the traffic to read/write the data from/to the iSCSI storage will be on VLAN200. In the second case the VM will read the data over VLAN200 and also write the data on VLAN200 (i.e. from/to the iSCSI storage).

André