NTA Support for the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS)

Traffic visibility within a data center's switching fabric is notoriously difficult to acquire, but it can be critical to understanding how your workloads relate to one another.

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer provides visibility into netflow data from VMware vSphere distributed switches, allowing filtering of east-west traffic on specific hypervisors. This can help you avoid service impacts when you're moving workloads.

East-west traffic visibility is important because it helps you determine where to place those workloads, and how to optimize them for relocation to the cloud.

NTA discovers the membership of the switch fabric through the vCenter interface, and then receives and displays endpoint-to-endpoint traffic sourced from the hypervisors.

The switch can also be configured to source all IPFIX records from a single IP address assigned to the VDS, but in most cases, it's more useful to see traffic instrumentation sourced from each hypervisor individually. The traffic records received represent conversations to and from the VMs on those hypervisors.

As more and more workloads are moved from data centers to public clouds, or even within a data center, the visibility NTA provides can help you better understand application dependencies, the relationships between their VMs, and how to optimize their existing environment to minimize latency.

You can also leverage the data generated by this added visibility to reduce alert fatigue, and enjoy better endpoint-flow alerting and faster troubleshooting.

Increase your visibility into VMware VDS, gain insight into where to relocate your workloads, and improve the performance of your environment with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer.