Networking for VMware Administrators

Introduction

In many organizations, there is still no Virtualization Team, or even a dedicated Virtualization Person. The care and feeding of a vSphere environment often falls under the “Perform other duties as assigned” bullet in the job description of existing server or storage administrators.

Virtualization is a complex subject, interdisciplinary by nature, and truly “getting it” requires a solid understanding of servers, storage, and networking. But because new technologies are often managed by whoever arrived to the meeting last, skill gaps are bound to come up. In the authors’ experience, networking is the subject most foreign to admins that inherit a vSphere environment. Server and storage teams tend to work rather closely, with the network ...