NIOC can only be enabled on a vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS).
NIOC equires vSphere Distributed Switch 5.1 or later.
NIOC version 3 requires vDS 6.0.
NIOC version 3 can provide reservations of network bandwidth.
Version 2 and version 3 of the Network I/O Control can coexist.
SR-IOV is not available for virtual machines configured to use Network I/O Control version 3.
Bandwidth shares, reservation, and limit per VM vNIC.
Load balancing of VMs by DRS during VM power on. This DRS feature will take into account network bandwidth reservations in addition to CPU and memory reservations while recommending which host a VM should be powered on.
Load balancing of powered on VMs when bandwidth reservations are violated.
– Identify Network I/O Control capabilities
Network I/O Control continuously monitors the I/O load over the network and dynamically allocates available resources.
Network I/O Control version 3 allocates bandwidth based on:
Shares Relative priority of traffic during contention. NIOC applies the configured shares when a physical adapter is saturated.
Reservation Minimum bandwidth in Mbps
Limit Maximum bandwidth in Mbps or Gbps
Network I/O Control can enabled on a distribute switch to allocate bandwidth for vSphere services and virtual machine networking.
Web Client -> Networking -> vDS -> Manage -> Resource Allocation -> System traffic
Traffic allocation for vSphere system services:
Management – Default 50 Shares
Fault Tolerance – Default 50 Shares
iSCSI – Default 50 Shares
NFS – Default 50 Shares
Virtual SAN – Default 50 Shares
vMotion – Default 50 Shares
vSphere Replication – Default 50 Shares
vSphere Data Protection Backup – Default 50 Shares
Virtual machine – Default 100 Shares
By default no reservations or limits are set on System traffic.
The total bandwidth reserved among all system traffic types cannot exceed 75 percent of the bandwidth that the physical network adapter with the lowest capacity can provide.
Version 3 of Network I/O Control allows you configure bandwidth requirements for individual virtual machines.
Bandwidth Allocation for Virtual Machine Traffic in the vSphere Networking Guide on page 164.
– Enable/Disable Network I/O Control
Enable Network I/O Control on a vSphere Distributed Switch in the vSphere Networking Guide on page 160.
NIOC is enabled on a vDS.
Network Resource Pools can be created and assigned to port groups.
Create a Network Resource Pool in the vSphere Networking Guide on page 168.
– Monitor Network I/O Control
NIOC can be monitored in the Web Client -> Networking -> vDS -> Manage -> Resource Allocation
