Term

Definition

NAT (network address translation)

In hosted networking, a type of network connection that enables you to connect your virtual machines to an external network when you have only one IP network address and the host computer uses that address. NAT passes network data between one or more virtual machines and the external network. It identifies incoming data packets intended for each virtual machine and sends them to the correct destination

Distributed virtual switch

An abstract representation of multiple hosts defining the same virtual switch (same name, same network policy) and port group.

VMCI (Virtual machine communication interface)

An infrastructure that provides communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host. The VMCI Sockets API facilitates development of applications that use the VMCI infrastructure.

VLAN (virtual local area network)

A software-managed logical segmentation of a physical LAN. Network traffic within each segment is isolated from traffic in all other segments.

VMkernel

In VMware ESXi™, a high-performance operating system that occupies the virtualization layer and manages most of the physical resources on the hardware, including memory, physical processors, storage, and networking controllers.

vNIC

A virtual network interface card that is configured on top of a system's physical network adapter.

VTEP (VXLAN Tunnel Endpoint)

Endpoints of the VXLAN communication which encapsulate/decapsulate the virtual machine traffic into/from a VXLAN header.

VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN)

An overlay technology which encapsulates/tunnels MAC frames at Layer 2 into a UDP header.

Security tag

Provides actionable security posture of the VM workload.