VDS

In the Ultra Transcenders books

2V0-17.252V0-16.25

Each book explains VDS in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• SWITCH

  Checks one expression against several candidate values, returning whichever result pairs with the match (or a fallback otherwise). Writing SWITCH ( TRUE (), ... ) avoids nested IF chains: whichever condition is first true wins.

• vCenter

  Management software for VMs, clusters and ESX hosts. Each domain in VCF gets a dedicated one.

• NSX

  Software that handles networking and security across VCF, covering firewalling, load balancing, NAT, VPCs, overlay segments and Tier-0/1 gateways.

• Agents (classic) API

  First-generation Foundry Agent Service API, based on threads, messages and runs. It is deprecated, replaced by conversations and responses, and retires on 31 March 2027.

• VMware Cloud Foundation

  Broadcom's platform for private cloud. It unifies management of NSX, vSAN, vSphere, VCF Automation and VCF Operations as one fleet; VVF, by contrast, lacks automation and cloud management.

Related terms

• Distributed port group

  Configures settings like teaming, VLAN, port binding and security for VMkernel adapters and VMs that connect to it, applied identically on all hosts joined to the vSphere Distributed Switch it lives on.

• Industrial vSwitch

  Designed for real-time industrial traffic, this vSphere Distributed Switch 9.0.0 mode can only be chosen when creating a switch, and it turns off health check, IPFIX, port mirroring and Network I/O Control, among others.

• LAG

  Bundles two or more ports into one logical uplink using LACP. On a vSphere Distributed Switch it is defined centrally and is replicated onto each member host's proxy switch.

• Network I/O Control

  Splits the bandwidth of a vSphere Distributed Switch's uplinks between VM traffic and the various system traffic types, using reservations, limits and shares. Standard switches lack this capability.

• Network Offloads Compatibility

  Pairing a vSphere Distributed Switch with a DPU (NVIDIA BlueField or Pensando) via this setting moves networking work onto the DPU. Once selected, Network I/O Control is turned off, and network resource pools, traffic filtering and traffic shaping cannot be used.

• Primary Workload Network

  Used by the Supervisor's control plane VMs for their traffic. Where networking is built on a vSphere Distributed Switch, this takes the form of a distributed port group; namespaces may share it or be given a separate port group instead.

• transport node profile

  NSX template that sets out VDS, transport zones, uplink profile and TEP addressing for turning every host of a vCenter cluster into a host transport node.

• Workload Network

  Gives Supervisor workloads connectivity over a distributed port group when VDS networking is used. Control plane VMs sit on the primary one, and each namespace may use that or another.