vSphere 5 Standard vSwitch question

[edutz1014]

I am prepping for my VCP exam and i need clarification on something please.

a Standard vSwitch with the default 120 ports (8 reserved for the vmkernel)  what actually uses a port on the vSwitch.

each virtual machine, each port group etc. If i have 10 vms in a port group does it use just one port?

I am trying to understand what actually requires a vswitch port and what does not. i know I will get config questions like you have  vmotion and 116 vms on a vswitch with xx amount of ports.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

any virtual network connection will use a port on vswitch - so each virual nic on a vm will use a port as well as the vmkernel ports used for management, vmotion and FT - A virtual machine port group itself does not use a port but the virtual machine nics connected to a vm port group will use the ports - 

[edutz1014]

Thank you for the info. Is there a way to tell how many ports are free on a vswitch. I know can do the cli but just shows me what has a port.

[slaclair]

If you have powercli installed run

Get-VirtualSwitch | Select-Object NumPortsAvailable

This will run against all vSS's on that host, if you wanted to run it against a all vSS's on a vCenter then that could easily be done with a foreach loop.

Best of luck in your studies!

[Rubeck]

There's a simple way using esxcli to display configured and used ports for a standard vSwitch:

esxcli network vswitch standard list | grep -i -A3 name

/Rubeck

[Shakaal]

Hi,

Also the uplinks(Physical NICs) connected to the switch will be using the Virtual ports to communicate with the VM's.

For Exapmle if you have a vSwitch with 2Physical NIC's connected to it you can subtract 2 from the total number of available virtual ports.

Regards

Vakul

[edutz1014]

Thanks everyone for the info, it really helped.