Configure Bandwidth Allocation for a Virtual Machine

You can configure bandwidth allocation to individual virtual machines that are connected to a distributed port group. You can use shares, reservation, and limit settings for bandwidth.

Prerequisites

• Verify that vSphere Distributed Switch is version 6.0.0 and later.

• Verify that Network I/O Control on the switch is version 3.
• Verify that Network I/O Control is enabled. See Enable Network I/O Control on a vSphere Distributed Switch.
• Verify that the virtual machine system traffic has a configured bandwidth reservation. See Configure Bandwidth Allocation for System Traffic.

Procedure

1. Locate the virtual machine in the vSphere Web Client.
   1. Select a data center, folder, cluster, resource pool, or host and click the VMs tab.
   2. Click Virtual Machines and double-click the virtual machine from the list.
2. On the Configure tab of the virtual machine, expand Settings and select VM Hardware.
3. Click Edit.
4. Expand the Network adapter X section of the VM network adapter.
5. If you want to configure bandwidth allocation for a new VM network adapter, from the New device drop-down menu select Network and click Add.
   A New Network section displays options for bandwidth allocation and other network adapter settings.
6. If the VM network adapter is not connected to the distributed port group, select the port group from the drop-down menu next to the Network adapter X or New Network label.
   The Shares, Reservation, and Limit settings appear for the VM network adapter.
7. From the Shares drop-down menu, set the relative priority of the traffic from this virtual machine as shares from the capacity of the connected 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.

8. In the Reservation text box, reserve a minimum bandwidth that must be available to the VM network adapter when the virtual machine is powered on.

   If you provision bandwidth by using a network resource pool, the reservation from the network adapters of powered on VMs that are associated with the pool must not exceed the quota of the pool.

   If vSphere DRS is enabled, to power on the virtual machine, make sure that the reservation from all VM network adapters on the host does not exceed the bandwidth reserved for virtual machine system traffic on the host physical adapters.

9. In the Limit text box, set a limit on the bandwidth that the VM network adapter can consume.
10. Click OK.

Results

Network

I/O Control allocates the bandwidth that you reserved for the network adapter of the virtual machine out of the reservation quota of the network resource pool.