Assign bandwidth for host management, virtual machines, NFS storage, vSphere vMotion, vSphere Fault Tolerance, vSAN, and vSphere Replication on the physical adapters that are connected to a vSphere Distributed Switch.

To enable bandwidth allocation for virtual machines by using Network I/O Control, configure the virtual machine system traffic. The bandwidth reservation for virtual machine traffic is also used in admission control. When you power on a virtual machine, admission control verifies that enough bandwidth is available.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Web Client, navigate to the distributed switch.
  2. On the Configure tab, expand Resource Allocation.
  3. Click System Traffic.
    You see the bandwidth allocation for the types of system traffic.
  4. Select the traffic type according to the vSphere feature that you want to provision and click Edit.
    The network resource settings for the traffic type appear.
  5. From the Shares drop-down menu, edit the share of the traffic in the overall flow through a physical adapter.

    Network I/O Control applies the configured shares when a physical adapter is saturated.

    You can select an option to set a pre-defined value, or select Custom and type a number from 1 to 100 to set another share.

  6. In the Reservation text box, enter a value for the minimum bandwidth that must be available for the traffic type.
    The total reservation for system traffic must not exceed 75% of the bandwidth supported by the physical adapter with the lowest capacity of all adapters connected to the distributed switch.
  7. In the Limit text box, set the maximum bandwidth that system traffic of the selected type can use.
  8. Click OK to apply the allocation settings.

Results

vCenter Server propagates the allocation from the distributed switch to the host physical adapters that are connected to the switch.