Converged fabric

Converged fabric describes a network that combines multiple traffic types across the same hardware. A non-Hyper-V application of this term is an Ethernet switch that carries Fibre Channel traffic through media convertors.

For Hyper-V, a converged fabric is created when a single external virtual switch hosts multiple roles. In a traditional non-converged design, each role (management, cluster communications, Live Migration, virtual machine traffic, and storage communications) has dedicated adapters or even dedicated teams. This is still a perfectly valid and useful configuration, but it is highly wasteful of adapter capacity and functionality. By leveraging native adapter teaming, all of these roles can share physical adapters while exploiting the Hyper-V switch to keep the traffic properly segregated. You can augment your converged fabric by using QoS (a topic explained in Chapter 6, Network Traffic Shaping and Performance Enhancements) to shape traffic.

The following diagram...