Configure rules and policies for each virtual machine ensuring resources are available for your business-critical applications with vSphere Network I/O Control. When I/O congestion is detected, Network I/O Control dynamically allocates the available I/O resources to flow types according to your business rules.  

• Increase administrator productivity by reducing the amount of active performance management required
• Bridge virtual and physical infrastructure quality of service with per resource 802.1 tagging
• Set, view and monitor network resource shares and limits

• Virtualize more types of workloads, including I/O-intensive business-critical applications
• Ensure that each cloud tenant gets their assigned share of I/O resources
• Set and enforce network priorities (per VM) across a cluster

• Reduce your need for network interfaces dedicated to a single virtual machine or application
• Enable multi-tenancy deployments

Network I/O Control
Today, many virtualized datacenters are shifting to the use of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network adapters. The use of 10GbE adapters replaces configuring multiple 1GB network cards. With 10GbE, ample bandwidth is provided for multiple traffic flows to coexist and share the same physical 10GbE link. Flows that were limited to the bandwidth of a single 1GbE link are now able to use as much as 10GbE.

As a result, the historic practice of deploying a large number of 1GB network adapters to accommodate peak bandwidth requirements can now be addressed by the use of 10 GbE network adapters. In fact, the previous shortcomings related to 1 GB, such as limited bandwidth or lower utilization, can now be solved through the adoption of 10 GbE.

However, while the use of a 10GbE solution greatly simplifies the networking infrastructure and addresses the previous shortcomings with 1 GB network cards, there are still a few challenges that still need to be addressed to maximize the value of a 10GbE solution. One primary challenge is to ensure that latency-sensitive and critical traffic flows can access the bandwidth they need.

With vSphere Network I/O Control (NIOC), the convergence of diverse workloads can be enabled to be on a single networking pipe to take full advantage of 10 GbE. The NIOC concept revolves around resource pools that are similar in many ways to the ones already existing for CPU and Memory. It provides sufficient controls to the vSphere administrator, in the form of limits and shares parameters, to enable and ensure predictable network performance when multiple traffic types contend for the same physical network resources. NIOC is only supported with the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS).

NIOC provides users with the following features:

• Isolation: Ensure traffic isolation so that a given flow will never be allowed to dominate over others, preventing drops and undesired jitter
• Shares: Allow flexible networking capacity partitioning to help users to deal with over commitment when flows compete aggressively for the same resources
• Limits: Enforce traffic bandwidth limit on the overall VDS set of dvUplinks
• Load-Based Teaming: Efficiently use a VDS set of dvUplinks for networking capacity
• IEEE 802.1p tagging: Tag packets going out of the vSphere host for proper handling by physical network resources.

NIOC classifies traffic into a number of predefined resource pools:

• vMotion
• iSCSI
• FT logging
• Management
• NFS (Network File System)
• Virtual machine traffic
• vSphere Replication traffic
• User Defined