Considering the fact that we now consolidate virtual machines with different workload characteristics less the number of hosts, the network I/O generated by these workloads can impose huge bandwidth requirements on the network adapters. Also, as the number of virtual machines increases, it takes some effort to monitor and control the bandwidth utilization of the workloads.
We did learn about using traffic shaping earlier in this chapter, but that has to be done as per the network construct level. NetIOC, however, operates at the vCenter level, giving it a bird's eye view of all the traffic types in a VDS. It can set bandwidth reservations, shares, limits, and so on to control the bandwidth utilization by controlling noisy neighbor situations.
NetIOC has this intrinsic ability to detect system traffic type and control its bandwidth usage based on shares, reservations, and limits. There are nine system traffic types as shown in the following...