VMware Networking Blog

**updated 8/27 to include room numbers!**

VMworld is upon us next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. We have a fantastic assortment of sessions from beginner level right up to the very advanced—something for everyone.

Breakout Sessions

As usual, we have a good assortment of networking sessions hosted by ourselves and our partners. I’ve listed the sessions in chronological order (I’m presenting the first two and then I’m done!). Srinivas Neginhal’s “VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive” (TA2525) is a 90-minute session and is also repeated at Thursday at 4:00pm.

Sessions are subject to change and sometimes repeated if very popular, so please consult the session catalog for the latest information.

The VMware Booth

We’ll have a network demo pod in the datacenter area of the VMware booth. We’ll be showing our three virtual networking solutions—vNetwork Standard Switch, vNetwork Distributed Switch, and the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Self Paced Lab

This year we feature a vSphere Virtual Networking Fundamentals course among the Self Paced Lab. Students can configure a vNetwork Standard Switch, a vNetwork Distributed Switch, and a Cisco Nexus 1000V.  

Feeling creative? Have a virtual networking problem or idea? If so, then the vNetwork APIs could be for you. The '”vNetwork API Community” is now open for business at the easy to remember url of vmware.com/go/vnetworkapis

The vNetwork API Community is hosted under the VMware Developer Communities website where you’ll find APIs, code samples, and other developer goodies for a range of VMware products and technologies.

In an earlier post in April, titled, “Which NIC is my VM using"? Load Balancing Visibility with vSphere”,  I described how esxtop could reveal the active (or hashed) vmnic for a VM or vmkernel port. Early vSphere 4 customers have found this an extremely useful feature, however, in my description, I completely ignored ESXi (sorry!).

Ok, so how do you do esxtop on ESXi? This is where vMA (the VMware Management Assistant—formerly called VIMA) and resxtop come in.  vMA is a VM containing a prepackaged installation of the vCLI (vSphere Command Line Interface), which allows admins to run scripts and agents for managing ESX and ESXi hosts (yes, both!). Within the vMA VM, you run the resxtop command, then type “n” to show what vmnics are used by what VMs and vmkernel ports. 

Note that you an also download vCLI as standalone software and install it on your own system.

Another neat thing is that you can quickly and easily deploy vMA to an ESX or ESXi host with the “Deploy from URL” wizard within the vSphere Client. Just point it at: http://www.vmware.com/go/importvma/vma4.ovf to download the ovf.