Need help understanding Port ID on VDS portgroup

[jayharmer]

In reference to the attached image..

1) Where does "Port ID: 161" come from? How is it generated?

2) What is the best way to view Port IDs ? GUI (if possible) and CLI?

3) Are there different types of Port IDs? vmnic vs? Or is that considered a vmnic in the image?

Thank you,

Jay

[adamwiso]

Putty into a host that a VM resides on or a vmnic and run esxcfg-vswitch -l

This will show you the DV port ID of everything on the host and whether it is in use or not, ie: 1/0 active/null

[bayupw]

In a physical network device, there is port number/port ID such as Ethernet1/1, GigabitEthernet1/1.

You can think port ID is like a port number but within a VDS.

In vSphere 6.5 for example, maximum number of VDS ports are 60,000 https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere6/r65/vsphere-65-configuration-maximums.pdf

You can view the port IDs by selecting VDS > Manage > Ports

Everytime you create a PortGroup, it will consume Port ID by default is 8 Ports but this can be changed.

For example I create a new PortGroup name "New PortGroup" and I put the number of ports: 2 (by default is

2 new Port ID will be allocated to that New PortGroup, in below example Port ID 130 & 131

Note: when we create a PortGroup, there is an option called "Port allocation" and this can be set to elastic or fixed

Elastic: The default number of ports is eight. When all ports are assigned, a new set of eight ports is created. This is the default.

Fixed: The default number of ports is set to eight. No additional ports are created when all ports are assigned.

Hope this helps