standard switch
- Virtual switch that is configured for a single host
Distributed switch
- Virtual switch that is configured for an entire datacenter
- Up to 2000 hosts can be attached
- Configuration is consistent across all attached hosts
- Hosts must have either an Enterprise Plus license or belong to a vSAN cluster
VCenter server owns the config of the distributed switch.
Standard & distributed shared features:
- Layer 2 switch
- VLAN segmentation (802.1Q tagging)
- IPv6 support
- NIC teaming
- Outbound traffic shaping
- CDP
Additional distributed features:
- Inbound traffic shaping
- VM Network port block
- Private VLANs
- Load-based teaming
- Data center level management
- vMotion migration of Virtual networking state
- Per-port policy settings
- Port state monitoring of network statistics
- Netflow
- Port mirroring
- Access to NSX-T port groups
- LLDP
- NIOC
