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MAC tables and MAC learning process

Physical switches use MAC tables to perform frame forwarding. Physical switches learn and build the MAC table. The switch reads the Ethernet headers and learns the MAC address of the device and makes an entry in its MAC table.

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) can discover a MAC address that corresponds to a known IP address, in order to permit the building of the layer 2 packets. From ESXi, you can see the ARP packets with this command:

[root@esxi2:~] tcpdump-uw arptcpdump-uw: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decodelistening on vmk0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 262144 bytes15:28:23.878389 ARP, Request who-has 10.10.70.110 tell nsxmanager.lab.local, length 4615:28:23.879198 ...

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