Traffic between VM's on the same ESX host

[VMwareNewbe]

Hi All

I'm pinging 2 VM's, both are located on the same ESX Host (ESX v4.1) The ping intermittantly drops packets.

Can someone advise whether the ping packet leaves the ESX host through the NIC onto the physical switch (VLAN) or does the ping packet remain within the ESX host.

Regards

Mike

[weinstein5]

If the VMs are on the same virtual switch and on the same subnet/vLAN than no the reaffic will remain within the ESX host -