<p class="MsoPlainText">Another new feature introduced with vSphere 4.1 that doesn't seem to get any &quot;coverage&quot; is Network I/O Control (NetIOC). Very similar to the I/O Control introduced for storage, NetIOC uses shares and hard limits to determine who gets access to the network resource (bandwidth).</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">When moving to 10Gb ethernet, it's common to see substantially fewer links/cables, where traditionally as many as 12 1Gbps links were used to provide the necessary bandwidth to all of the network traffic in a virtualized environment. Because there are fewer physical links, with the same number of machines using them, it's important to have the ability to prioritize, limit, or otherwise &quot;protect&quot; the traffic of important functions.</p>
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<p class="MsoPlainText">In order to accomplish this, NetIOC classifies traffic as one of six different categories:</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span> </span> - vMotion</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span> </span> - Management</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span> </span> - Fault Tolerance Logging</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span> </span> - VM Network Traffic</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span> </span> - iSCSI</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span> </span> - NFS</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Once NetIOC is enabled, you can select from the types of traffic above and set a share value and/or a bandwidth limit. As is the case with Load Based Teaming, NetIOC is only available on the Distributed Virtual Switch-- and it's at the vDS level where NetIOC is enabled.</p>
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<img src="http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/6413/networkioc.jpg" alt="" />