HP FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5900v Technology White Paper

1
Overview
The HP FlexFabric virtual switch 5900v (5900v virtual switch) is designed for virtualized environments
such as data centers. It is applicable to the VMware vSphere ESXi Enterprise Plus Edition. The 5900v
virtual switch integrates with VMware vCenter Server and VMware ESXi to provide the enhanced
distributed virtual bridging function.
Technical background
The fast development of server virtualization brings more and more virtual machines (VMs) to deployment.
With the virtualization software Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) installed on a physical server, the server
can create at least one VM. VMM includes VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Each VM operates independently and has its own operating system, applications, and virtual hardware
environments. The virtual hardware environments include virtual CPUs, memories, storage media, IO
devices (virtual NICs, for example), and Ethernet switches (bridges), as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Server virtualization
VMs on a physical server communicate with each other or with the outside network through a Virtual
Ethernet Bridge (VEB). Each VM is assigned a virtual NIC with a unique MAC address for the VEB to
implement packet forwarding.
Benefits
The 5900v virtual switch operates on the VMware ESXi management program and supports the IEEE
802.1Qbg (EVB) standard and the OpenFlow framework. It has the following advantages: