VMware recently published a new paper titled: VMware Network I/O Control, Architecture, Performance and Best Practices. The paper contains 28 pages and is written by Sreekanth Setty, which is a member of the Performance Engineering team at VMware.
The Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature available in VMware vSphere 4.1 (“vSphere”) addresses these challenges by introducing a software approach to partitioning physical network bandwidth among the different types of network traffic flows. It does so by providing appropriate quality of service (QoS) policies enforcing traffic isolation, predictability and prioritization, therefore helping IT organizations overcome the contention resulting from consolidation. The experiments conducted in VMware performance labs using industry-standard workloads show that NetIOC:
• Maintains NFS and/or iSCSI storage performance in the presence of other network traffic such as vMotion and bursty virtual machines.
• Provides network service level guarantees for critical virtual machines.
• Ensures adequate bandwidth for VMware Fault Tolerance (VMware FT) logging.
• Ensures predictable vMotion performance and duration.
• Facilitates any situation where a minimum or weighted level of service is required for a particular traffic type independent of other traffic types.
This whitepaper complements the papers already released earlier this year on vSphere 4.1. by VMware