#VCP #Network #WIP #Concept Special types of port on a virtual switch. Used for VMware specific traffic like Management, vMotion, FT, vSAN etc. Needed for communication between ESXi Servers and VMware services. ## Roles A VMK can be assigned one or more roles. Each role has a different use case in the vSphere environment. ### Management Managment & configuration traffic of ESXi host themselves and HA traffic. Default VMK that is created when ESXi is installed. ### vMotion Network used for live migration (vMotion) traffic is usually encrypted if both source and destination support that. Should usually be in a seperate VLAN/Subnet. ### Provisioning Traffic for cold migrations, cloning and snapshot migration. ### vSAN Traffic for vSAN, stuff like rebuilding, syncing and other stuff. Should be running on dedicated physical NIC. ### vSphere replication handles the repliocation traffic sent to a replication server. ### FT Traffic for [[vSphere - Fault Tolerance]] traffic /replication of primary to secondary VM. ## TCP/IP stack There are 3 preconfigured TCP/IP stacks always available in a VMK configuration. - Default TCP/IP Stack - provides networking support for management traffic between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts and other services/roles if configured. - vMotion TCP/IP Stack - Used for vMotion traffic to better isolate the traffic. Once enabled only this stack is used for all vMotion traffic. - Provisioning TCP/IP Stack - Supports traffic for virtual machine cold migration, cloning and snapshot migration. additionally you can create Custom TCP/IP stacks to handle different traffic of custom applications. ## Roles A VMK can be assigned one or more roles. Each role has a different use case in the vSphere environment. ### Management Managment & configuration traffic of ESXi host themselves and HA traffic. Default VMK that is created when ESXi is installed. ### vMotion Network used for live migration (vMotion) traffic is usually encrypted if both source and destination support that. Should usually be in a seperate VLAN/Subnet. ### Provisioning Traffic for cold migrations, cloning and snapshot migration. ### vSAN Traffic for vSAN, stuff like rebuilding, syncing and other stuff. Should be running on dedicated physical NIC. ### vSphere replication handles the repliocation traffic sent to a replication server. ### FT Traffic for [[vSphere - Fault Tolerance]] traffic /replication of primary to secondary VM. ### IP storage for iSCSI, Dependendant Hardware iSCSI and NFS ### NVMe over TCP & NVMe over RDMA both needed to communicate NVMe protocol over either the TCP/IP stack or RDMA. ## TCP/IP stack There are 3 preconfigured TCP/IP stacks always available in a VMK configuration. - Default TCP/IP Stack - provides networking support for management traffic between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts and other services/roles if configured. - vMotion TCP/IP Stack - Used for vMotion traffic to better isolate the traffic. Once enabled only this stack is used for all vMotion traffic. - Provisioning TCP/IP Stack - Supports traffic for virtual machine cold migration, cloning and snapshot migration. additionally you can create Custom TCP/IP stacks to handle different traffic of custom applications. create a custom stack with `esxcli network ip netstack add N="New_Stack_Name"`. Once added it can be assigned via the GUI.