6.5.1

Table Of Contents
Bandwidth Allocation Parameters for Network Resource Pools in
Network I/O Control Version 2
Parameter for
Bandwidth
Allocation Description
Shares When a physical adapter is saturated, the virtual machines or VMkernel adapters that use the adapter receive
bandwidth to the external network according to the shares configured on the network resource pool.
The physical adapter shares that are assigned to a network resource pool determine the share of the total
available bandwidth guaranteed to the traffic associated with that network resource pool. The actual share of
bandwidth for outgoing traffic available to a network resource pool is determined by the shares of the network
resource pool and what other network resource pools are actively transmitting.
For example, you assign 100 shares to vSphere FT traffic and iSCSI traffic, while each of the other network
resource pools has 50 shares. A physical adapter is configured to send traffic for vSphere Fault Tolerance, iSCSI
and management. At a certain moment, vSphere Fault Tolerance and iSCSI are the active traffic types on the
physical adapter and they use up its capacity. Each traffic receives 50% of the available bandwidth. At another
moment, all three traffic types saturate the adapter. In this case, vSphere FT traffic and iSCSI traffic obtain 40% of
the adapter capacity, and vMotion 20%.
Note The iSCSI traffic resource pool shares do not apply to iSCSI traffic on a dependent hardware iSCSI
adapter.
Limit The host limit of a network resource pool is the maximum bandwidth that the traffic associated with the network
resource pool can consume on a physical adapter.
QoS tag Assigning a QoS priority tag to a network resource pool applies an 802.1p (CoS) tag to all outgoing packets
associated with that network resource pool. In this way, you can mark certain traffic so that network devices, such
as switches, can handle it with higher priority.
Create a Network Resource Pool in Network I/O Control Version 2
Create user-defined network resource pools to customize bandwidth allocation when the traffic that flows
through a physical network adapter becomes intensive.
Prerequisites
n
Verify that the vSphere Distributed Switch is version 5.1 and later.
n
Verify that Network I/O Control on the distributed switch is version 2.
n
Enable Network I/O Control on the distributed switch. See Enable Network I/O Control on a vSphere
Distributed Switch.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the distributed switch.
2 On the Configure tab, expand Resource Allocation.
3 Click New.
4 Enter a name and optionally a description for the network resource pool.
vSphere Networking
VMware, Inc. 199