Regulating Network I/O Utilization

The resource pools we have discussed thus far only control CPU and memory usage. However, vSphere offers another type of resource pool, a network resource pool, which allows you to control and prioritize network utilization. Using network resource pools—to which you assign shares and limits—you can control incoming and outgoing network traffic. This feature is referred to as vSphere Network I/O Control or NIOC.

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ONLY ON A DISTRIBUTED SWITCH

vSphere Network I/O Control applies only to vSphere Distributed Switches (vDS) version 4.1.0 or later and, prior to version 5.1.0, it was limited to outbound network traffic only. Refer to Chapter 5, “Creating and Configuring a vSphere Network,” for more information on setting up or configuring a vDS.

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When you enable NIOC on a vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS), vSphere activates the following nine predefined network resource pools:

• Fault Tolerance (FT) Traffic
• Management Traffic
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