6.7

Table Of Contents
Models for Bandwidth Resource Reservation
Network I/O Control version 3 supports separate models for resource management of system traffic
related to infrastructure services, such as vSphere Fault Tolerance, and of virtual machines.
The two traffic categories have different nature. System traffic is strictly associated with an ESXi host. The
network traffic routes change when you migrate a virtual machine across the environment. To provide
network resources to a virtual machine regardless of its host, in Network I/O Control you can configure
resource allocation for virtual machines that is valid in the scope of the entire distributed switch.
Bandwidth Guarantee to Virtual Machines
Network I/O Control version 3 provisions bandwidth to the network adapters of virtual machines by using
constructs of shares, reservation and limit. Based on these constructs, to receive sufficient bandwidth,
virtualized workloads can rely on admission control in vSphere Distributed Switch, vSphere DRS and
vSphere HA. See Admission Control for Virtual Machine Bandwidth.
Availability of Features
SR-IOV is not available for virtual machines configured to use Network I/O Control version 3.
Enable Network I/O Control on a vSphere Distributed
Switch
Enable network resource management on a vSphere Distributed Switch to guarantee minimum bandwidth
to system traffic for vSphere features and to virtual machine traffic.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the distributed switch.
2 From the Actions menu, select Edit Settings.
3 From the Network I/O Control drop-down menu, select Enable.
4 Click OK.
When enabled, the model that Network I/O Control uses to handle bandwidth allocation for system traffic
and virtual machine traffic is based on the Network I/O Control version that is active on the distributed
switch. See About vSphere Network I/O Control Version 3.
Bandwidth Allocation for System Trac
You can configure Network I/O Control to allocate certain amount of bandwidth for traffic generated by
vSphere Fault Tolerance, vSphere vMotion, and so on.
vSphere Networking
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