vSphere Distributed Switch Part 3 – Difference between Standard Switch and Distributed switch

I have been asked by lot of people during my training sessions about the difference’s between standard and distributed switch. I decided it’s the time to post the series of posts about distributed switch to help the readers to learn about distributed switch. In this post, I have explained the major differences about standard and distributed switch.
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Features	Standard Switch	Distributed Switch
Management	Standard switch needs to managed at each individual host level	Provides centralized management and  monitoring of the network configuration  of all the ESXi hosts that are associated with the dvswitch.
Licensing	Standard Switch is available for all  Licensing Edition	Distributed switch is only available for enterprise edition of licensing
Creation & configuration	Standard switch can be created and  configured at ESX/ESXi host level	Distributed switch can be created and configured  at the vCenter server level
Layer 2 Switch	Yes, can forward Layer 2 frames	Yes, can forward Layer 2 frames
VLAN segmentation	Yes	Yes
802.1Q tagging	Can use and understand 802.1q VLAN tagging	Can use and understand 802.1q VLAN tagging
NIC teaming	Yes, can utilize multiple uplink to  form NIC teaming	Yes, can utilize multiple uplink to form  NIC teaming
Outbound Traffic Shaping	Can be achieved using standard switch	Can be achieved using distributed switch
Inbound Traffic Shaping	Not available as part of standard switches	Only possible at distributed switch
VM port blocking	Not available as part of standard  switches	Only possible at distributed switch
Private VLAN	Not available	PVLAN can be created as part of dvswitch. 3 types of PVLAN(Promiscuous,  Community and Isolated)
Load based Teaming	Not available	Can be achieved using distributed switch
Network vMotion	Not available	Can be achieved using distributed switch
Per Port policy setting	Policy can be applied at switch and port group	Policy can be applied at switch, port group and even per port level
NetFlow	Not available	Yes
Port Mirroring	Not available	Yes

I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for reading !!!!