Network I/O Control

A distributed virtual switch is similar to a standard virtual switch, except that it operates at the virtual datacenter level and has far more features. Distributed virtual switches are managed by and configured in vCenter. The configuration is consistent across all ESXi hosts configured for use by a distributed virtual switch. vCenter stores the state of the distributed virtual switch, port groups, and ports in its database so that networking policies and performance statistics migrate with the virtual machines when migrated to a different ESXi host. Check http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1010555 and http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1010557 for more on the creation of configuration of distributed virtual switches.

vSphere 4.1 introduced the Network I/O Control, a distributed virtual switch feature that gives an administrator the ability to make bandwidth guarantees for different types of network traffic. In an environment where multiple types of traffic are sharing the same network pipe...