Owner's Manual

End Point
• A point of attachment to a software-managed network.
• Can be a VM running on a host or host network interface controller (NIC) cards.
• End points represented by a VM on a host are called VM end points.
• End points represented by host network card interfaces are called host end points.
External Providers
• A provider creates one or more tenants, networks, and policies.
• A provider creates networks using hosts with one or more endpoints and manages them as part of the
provider infrastructure.
• A provider creates one or more policies and associates them with a specific tenant or tenant group.
These policies enforce specific actions for all networks associated with the provider tenant or all
endpoints used by hosts associated with a tenant of the specified provider.
• You can also associate a provider-created policy with a network managed by the provider or with
endpoints on the hosts managed by the provider.
• A provider allocates one or more hosts, which contain one or more endpoints, to a tenant.
Leaf Node
• Devices connected to the head node; also known as edge devices.
Network
• A virtual network, logical switch, or Layer2 (L2) domain managed by the software.
Node
• Any device connected to a network or any device with an IP address.
Policy
• One or more rules that define the operations of a tenant, switch, link, network, host, or network
connection.
Rule
• Consists of two components: match and action.
• The match component contains the flow attributes and the action components contains the
expected switch behavior.
Switches and Switch Ports
• Any switch elements in the fabric.
• The controller can only gather data from the switch and cannot be used to configure the switch.
System
• The software creates an internal root provider. By default, any managed object that is not associated
with an external provider is associated with the internal provider.
• All external providers must use a unique ID.
Tenants
• A tenant is any client on the active fabric network.
Introduction
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