Before I introduce you to the new networking features in vSphere 5, I want to take a moment and introduce myself first. My name is Venky and I work in the Technical Marketing group at VMware. I am responsible for technical marketing activities around vSphere Networking features. I am really excited to share and learn with you on this forum. I would like to kick this journey off by introducing the new networking features.
There are two broad types of networking capabilities that are new or enhanced in the VMware vSphere 5 release. The first type improves the network administrator’s ability to monitor and troubleshoot virtual infrastructure traffic by introducing features such as
• NetFlow V5
• Port mirror (SPAN)
I am sure Network administrators are very happy to hear this. Now they have the required visibility into the virtual infrastructure to monitor and troubleshoot network issues. Also, support for LLDP (standard based discovery protocol) simplifies the network configuration and management in non-Cisco switch environment.
The second type focuses on enhancements to the network I/O control (NIOC) capability first released in vSphere 4.1. These NIOC enhancements target the management of I/O resources in consolidated I/O environments with 10Gb network interface cards. The enhancements to NIOC enable customers to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS) through allocating I/O shares for user-defined traffic types as well as tagging packets for prioritization by external network infrastructure. The following are the key NIOC enhancements:
• Ability to create User-defined resource pool
• Support for vSphere replication traffic type
• Support for IEEE 802.1p tagging
These Traffic management features are very useful when customers are thinking of deploying Tier1 applications or hosting multiple tenants with different I/O resource requirements.
In the next blog entry I will talk more about the Monitoring and troubleshooting features.
