Management traffic

In the Ultra Transcenders books

2V0-18.25

Each book explains Management traffic 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.

• OVER

  Gives a T-SQL window function its window: PARTITION BY, ORDER BY and, if wanted, a ROWS or RANGE frame. Rankings and running totals can then be worked out while every row is kept.

• management network

  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.

• VMkernel adapter

  An ESX host's own virtual network interface, named vmk0, vmk1 and so forth. It handles host services like management, vMotion, vSAN and IP storage, as opposed to traffic from VMs.

• vSphere HA

  When a host fails, this cluster capability restarts its VMs elsewhere; through VM Component Protection and VM Monitoring it also reacts to storage and VM failures.

Related terms

• Backplane traffic

  Replication of storage between CVMs, together with host management, high availability and, on AHV, moving running VMs. Segmenting the network can keep all this apart from management traffic.

• ESX management network

  Carries host management traffic for ESX over a VLAN. VCF recommends a dedicated VLAN and subnet per workload domain, kept apart from the VM management network that the remaining management components share.

• Firewall Management NIC

  A second Azure Firewall interface, in AzureFirewallManagementSubnet with a public IP of its own, carrying management traffic. Forced tunnelling requires it; an existing firewall gains one after a stop and restart.

• GatewayManager (service tag)

  Represents the management traffic Azure's own infrastructure sends. On an Application Gateway v2 subnet, the NSG has to let this tag in on ports 65200-65535 (65503-65534 for v1).

• Provisioning traffic

  Traffic generated when VMs are cloned, cold-migrated or have snapshots migrated, NFC transfers included, treated by the VMkernel as its own system traffic type. Since vSphere 9.0, Network I/O Control can set aside bandwidth for it so it does not crowd out management traffic.

• SNMP

  Used to poll devices for their status and to receive traps. The agent is configured in Prism, and on a segmented network this traffic is treated as management traffic.

• 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.