C.0 Discovering or Dynamically Creating vSphere Port Groups

If you manage a vSphere hypervisor environment, you can configure virtual switches (vSwitches) and distributed virtual switches (dvSwitches) with virtual ports to allow virtual machines on the same ESX Server host to communicate on the network. Your VMware environment also requires port groups, which, according to the VMware Infrastructure Library “define how a connection is made through the vSwitch to the (physical) network construct.”

You can use PlateSpin Orchestrate to monitor the discovered VMs in your vSphere environment (provided that you have configured the vSwitches or dvSwitches on those VMs), dynamically deleting unused port groups from the virtual switches to free up resources on the vSwitch or dvSwitch so that it can be used elsewhere in the virtual network. Then, if you later decide to provision a VM that requires the port group, Orchestrate can be configured to automatically re-create the required port group. This allows VMs to be moved or migrated from one host to another without reconfiguring the networking information on either the VM or the host.

This section includes the following information: