What does VDS mean in UNCLASSIFIED

A VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is a virtual switch used for managing multiple ESXi hosts in a virtualized environment. It increases network scalability by allowing administrators to manage network traffic across multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on different ESXi hosts from a single console. VDS provides enhanced visibility into virtual networks, which allows admins to easily monitor and modify settings of all connected VMs in one place. It also features policy-based automation and offers increased security and reliability.

Using VDS provides several benefits such as improved network scalability, deeper visibility into virtual networks, centralized management, policy-based automation, increased security and reliability. VDS also allows admins to rapidly provision new networking services without having to configure each physical switch separately.

Yes, VDS supports devices from leading third-party vendors such as Dell EMC Networking, HPE Aruba Networks, Juniper Networks, Avaya, Arista Networks and Cisco Systems.

By leveraging its distributed architecture, VDS enables admins to centrally manage multiple ESXi hosts from a single console to quickly scale the data center's networking capacity. This helps streamline virtualization processes and reduces time associated with provisioning networking services for each separate server.

With its enhanced visibility capabilities, VDS allows admins to monitor VM traffic flows across the entire network with little effort, enabling them to quickly identify issues or misconfigurations that need attention. All parameters related to port configuration or bandwidth utilization can be managed with just a few clicks from one interface instead of modifying each individual port setting on different servers or physical switches separately.

The maximum number of ports supported by vSphere Distributed Switch depends on the edition of vCenter Server being used as well as the license type for VMware ESXi host(s). Generally speaking though you can expect that Standard Edition will support up to 128 ports per switch while Enterprise Plus will support up to 1024 ports per switch.

Yes you can use port mirroring on your vSphere Distributed Switch which will allow you to replicate traffic between two or more ports within the same switch or even between different switches. This feature is useful for analyzing network problems for example if an issue arises between two specific virtual machines then you can leverage port mirroring in order to analyze their communication more closely.

You can back up your configuration through native functions within your vCenter Server since it has built-in mechanisms that allow you take snapshots that capture changes made over time so that restoring your infrastructure become easier when needed.