Flow Collection in Virtual Environments

The vSphere v5 distributed vSwitch and the Cisco Nexus 1000V support flow export in a virtual environment. Either solution provides visibility into the virtualized environment, including:

intrahost virtual machine traffic (virtual machine-to-virtual machine traffic on the same host)

interhost virtual machine traffic (virtual machine-to-virtual machine traffic on different hosts)

virtual machine-physical infrastructure traffic

Note: In VMware ESXi v5.5 and earlier, only the distributed vSwitch supports the export of NetFlow data.