Carries traffic between an ESX host and vCenter, along with other management traffic. From the DCUI, Configure Management Network lets an administrator change its VLAN, addressing, name servers and NICs.
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains management network in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- ESX
VMware's bare-metal hypervisor, installed on each host in a VCF fleet. Up to version 9.0 it was known as ESXi.
- vCenter
Management software for VMs, clusters and ESX hosts. Each domain in VCF gets a dedicated one.
- DCUI
Text console on an ESX host or the vCenter appliance, used to set up networking initially, troubleshoot, and turn on SSH or the ESX Shell.
- VLAN
Layer 2 broadcast domain tagged using 802.1Q. In VCF they carry TEP, vSAN, vMotion and management traffic, and NSX can back segments with them.
Related terms
- Datastore heartbeating
When a secondary host stops answering over the management network, the HA primary looks at shared heartbeat datastores to tell a dead host apart from one that is merely cut off or partitioned.
- host isolation
An HA host keeps working yet can no longer hear its peers on the management network. A configurable response says whether to power off its VMs so they restart elsewhere.
- isolation address
Used by a vSphere HA host to test whether it has lost network contact: if pings to it fail, the host considers itself isolated. The management network gateway is used unless configured otherwise, and das.isolationaddress0 to 9 adds as many as ten more.
- network partition
A management network fault splits an HA cluster into groups of hosts that cannot reach each other; only the group holding a VM's primary host keeps protecting it.