Deployment Guide

14 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0
5 A VMware VDS with VM network resource pools
In VMware vSphere 6.0, Network I/O Control (NIOC) version 3 provides network resource pools to partition
network capacity during a resource contention event. These network resource pools provide predictable
networking performance while different network traffic streams contend for the same bandwidth. Following is
the list of the nine predefined system network-resource pools:
1. Fault Tolerance (FT) Traffic
2. Management Traffic
3. NFS Traffic
4. VM Traffic
5. Virtual SAN Traffic
6. iSCSI Traffic
7. vMotion Traffic
8. vSphere Data Protection Backup Traffic
9. vSphere Replication (VR) Traffic
NIOC guarantees traffic resource-pool bandwidth at the vNIC level. This allows vSphere administrators to
ensure that mission-critical VMs can effectively share the same upstream links.
VM traffic resource-pool configuration includes three editable options:
 Shares: Shares, from 1 to 100, reflect the relative priority of a system traffic type against the other
system traffic types active on the same pNIC. Network I/O Resource Management totals up all the shares
and sets each in relation to the total. A system traffic type’s relative shares and the amount of data that
other system features transmit determine the traffic type’s available bandwidth. If a vNIC has a share
value of Normal (50 shares), that vNIC is not necessarily entitled to 50% of the bandwidth. Finally, unless
a congestion event is occurring on the vNIC that the traffic types are using, the Network I/O Resource
Management service allows other traffic types to use available bandwidth dynamically. Following are the
relative priorities indicated by the Shares option:
o High = 100
o Normal = 50
o Low = 25
o Custom = Any value between 1 and 100
 Reservation: The minimum bandwidth, in Mbps, that must be guaranteed on a single physical adapter.
The total bandwidth reserved among all system traffic types cannot exceed 75 percent of the bandwidth
that the lowest capacity physical network adapter provides. For example, the Reservation value for a
10GbE network adapter is 7.5GbE.
 Limit: The maximum bandwidth in Mbps or Gbps that a system traffic type can consume on a single
physical adapter.
Note: VM network resource pools only control outgoing traffic from the VM to the VDS.