Creating a vswitch on VMware ESX server with a specified number of ports

This isn’t documented in the man page, so hopefully this will be useful.

When creating a switch using “esxcfg-vswitch” it is possible to specify the number of ports for the new switch by adding placing a ‘:’ followed by the number of ports right after the vswitch name. So for example to create a vswitch named vSwitch7 with 256 ports the command would be:
esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch7:256