Monitor Traffic through VMware vSwitches

[gboskin]

Hi all

is there a way I can mirror or monitor the traffic going thorugh vmware vSwitches

[Ken_Cline]

For now, the closest you can get is to enable promiscuous mode on the vSwitch and connect a VM with something like WireShark to monitor the traffic. The ESX2 / ESX3 vSwitch is pretty much a black box. Expect major improvements with ESX4.

Ken Cline

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blogging at: http://KensVirtualReality.wordpress.com/

[Lightbulb]

Nope as has already been said. You can monitor traffic on the physical switchport uplinks using MRTG or Cacti there is even a virtual appliance for Cacti (http://virtualappliances.net/downloads/esx/i386/VA-Cacti/)

[MWPatterson74]

Altor make an appliance makes that will watch and you can view traffic with, I have demoed it and I would love to get it in my current work place. Altornetworks here is the link and I would give it a try. Since it is a switch on the ESX side you can do some impressive stuff with it. You could also use other opensource tools, just make sure that you have your virtual switch port setup correctly to view the traffic on your client systems. You could use port mirroring on the physical switch but if you have youyrs like we have ours you would need to run the tools on multile machines and make sure that you do not miss anything that you might miss if the traffic is not routed out the same port that you are monitoring.