Network
From the point of view of performance and capacity management, network has different fundamental characteristics than compute or storage. The key differences are summarized in the following table:
|
Compute or storage |
Network |
|---|---|
|
A relatively high amount of resources available to the VM |
A low amount of resources available |
|
Granular resource allocation at the VM level |
Coarse allocation |
|
Single-purpose hardware |
Multi-purpose hardware |
|
A node |
An interconnect |
Let's understand these differences in more detail, starting from the first one:
At the end of the day, the net resources available to the VMs is what we care about. What the ESXi and IaaS platform use is considered an overhead.
An ESXi host has a fixed specification (for example, two CPUs, 36 cores, 256 GB of RAM, two 10 GE NICs). This means that we know the upper physical limit. How much of that it available to the VMs? Let's take a look:
- For compute, the hypervisor consumes a relatively low proportion of resources. Even...
