An AHV construct for managing bridges and uplinks, made of nodes plus their uplink ports with one OVS bridge pooled across them. It covers either one cluster or several.
Also called VS.
Read more: Nutanix docs
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Virtual switch in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Nutanix AHV
The hypervisor from Nutanix. Veeam's integration backs up its VMs to repositories and can restore to it from backups of vSphere, Hyper-V, AHV and other platforms.
- Open vSwitch
A software switch, open source, that sits in the Linux kernel of every AHV host. Across a cluster, these instances act together as one switch.
Related terms
- Default virtual switch
Created during installation or upgrade, this virtual switch links bridge br0 across every AHV host in the cluster.
- IGMP snooping
Set on each virtual switch in AHV, this prevents a host from flooding multicast to all VMs on a VLAN. A querier is required, which can be the built-in Acropolis one or from a third party.
- MAC address spoofing
Allows a Hyper-V VM to transmit frames under MAC addresses that aren't its own. Nested setups need it enabled on the outer VM, otherwise guests inside cannot reach the network across both virtual switch layers.
- NIC
A network adapter. It may be physical, sitting in a host and serving as an uplink for a virtual switch, or virtual, assigned to a VM.
- NIC teaming
Physical NICs, at least two, combined behind one virtual switch so that a failed link is covered and, with certain load-balancing algorithms, more bandwidth is available. VCF sets port groups to Route based on physical NIC load by default; for vSAN, teaming provides failover only.
- Switch Embedded Teaming
NIC teaming handled by the Hyper-V switch itself, bonding as many as eight identical network adapters. Using an LBFO team underneath a virtual switch is the older approach it replaced.
- V4 API
Nutanix's REST API in this release is the only route for certain tasks, one being tying a VPC to a multicluster virtual switch.
- VDS
Virtual switch defined once in vCenter and pushed out to each member host. NSX runs on top of it on VCF host transport nodes.