ESXi 5.5: Standard vs Distributed switch for home use

[cgram23]

I'm a little confused on the benefits of moving to a distributed switch. Keep in mind that this is for a home server, so the number of simultaneous users won't be huge (< 10). Right now, I have 4 physical NICs on my server connected to an HP 1810. I don't have LACP set up for those ports on the HP switch, and vSphere has these in a standard teaming config (no LACP).

If I move to a distributed switch, and configure LACP, would I gain any real world throughput? Or would this just provide added failover/redundancy?

Thanks to anyone who can clear this up for me.

 

[gimp]

You don't get the dvSwitch with the free ESXi license.
FWIW, we only use the dvSwitch at our largest datacenters.
We have 3 other sites with 2-3 hosts each and we use regular vSwitches there.

I wouldn't imagine Enterprise Plus licensing would be very cost-efficient for home use.

 

[cgram23]

Licensing isn't a concern. Let's just say that large lab budgets are a good thing.

Aside from financial roadblocks....would I gain anything from implementing the dvSwitch?

 

[gimp]

dvSwitch config is stored in vSphere, so it should automatically apply to all hosts.
Whereas a regular vSwitch config is stored on the ESXi host itself, essentially.

So with a dvSwitch, add new hosts and you won't need to create the switch. iirc.

Then there's the additional capabilities.

Comparing vNetwork Standard Switch with vNetwork Distributed Switch

These features are available with both types of virtual switches:
&#8226;Can forward L2 frames
&#8226;Can segment traffic into VLANs
&#8226;Can use and understand 802.1q VLAN encapsulation
&#8226;Can have more than one uplink (NIC Teaming)
&#8226;Can have traffic shaping for the outbound (TX) traffic

These features are available only with a Distributed Switch:
&#8226;Can shape inbound (RX) traffic
&#8226;Has a central unified management interface through vCenter Server
&#8226;Supports Private VLANs (PVLANs)
&#8226;Provides potential customization of Data and Control Planes

vSphere 5.x provides these improvements to Distributed Switch functionality:
&#8226;Increased visibility of inter-virtual machine traffic through Netflow
&#8226;Improved monitoring through port mirroring (dvMirror)
&#8226;Support for LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol), a vendor-neutral protocol.
&#8226;The enhanced link aggregation feature provides choice in hashing algorithms and also increases the limit on number of link aggregation groups
&#8226;Additional port security is enabled through traffic filtering support.
&#8226;Improved single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) support and 40GB NIC support.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1010555

Would you benefit? Well, it could be beneficial to have a test lab to learn with and provide the additional capabilities.

 

[NoFonter]

The biggest difference between the two switch types is that distributed switches are configured using a central unified management interface through vCenter Server, which greatly simplifies virtual machine network configuration and reduces complexity in clustered ESXi environments.

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