Hello,

Physical MAC addresses are the burned-in addresses on the hardware. Typically, this is bound by the IANA rules and each vendor will have a specific range that they can use.

Virtual MAC addresses are user configurable parameter that people use in the network for simplicity sake. Virtual MACs are used typically when you have a redundancy setup where all the redundant components will share the same virtual MAC. So, the network need to forward only one copy of the datagram to the virtual MAC and all corresponding components will process it.

Typical examples of use of virtual MAC:

HSRP setup

Server Load Balancing

Firewall Failovers

Hope this helps.

Regards,

NT