When I move from a set of physical NICs to a virtual I/O device, what ESXi sees as physical NICs are now actually virtual NICs. This makes many features of ESXi geared toward managing traffic and configuration out of physical NICs to need rethinking.
I'm looking to understand the impact of Virtual I/O devices such as Cisco UCS or Xsigo director on VMware virtual switch configuration.
For example:
NIOC:
When I want to prioritize NFS traffic, normally I can set shares using NIOC. However, what happens when I introduce a virtual I/O device such as UCS / Xsigo into the equation? The NFS traffic receives priority in getting to the vmnic seen by the hypervisor. However, it is the configuration of the UCS / Xsigo device that controls which vmnic gets priority when traffic from multiple vmnics has to go to the same Xsigo physical ethernet port .
What is the proper way to handle this to insure that the traffic I prioritize in VMware is prioritized on the physical uplinks, since VMware no longer manages the physical uplinks directly?
Load Based Teaming:
Then, if I configure load-based teaming, normally I would be balancing the traffic out of physical network adapters by configuring this in vmware. With virtual I/O, now I am only balancing them between virtual adapters presented by the virtual I/O device. The virtual I/O device may or may not be sending this traffic out its physical ethernet ports in a way that mirrors what would have happened without virtual I/O. Two virtual adapters that are used in a load-based team could be mapped to a single ethernet port, or mixed with other traffic out that port in such a way that defeats the purpose of load-based teaming. Should I use both load-based teaming and some kind of policy on my virtual I/O device together? Is there a guide to walk through these kinds of considerations?
Besides NIOC and load based teaming, there are other considerations, as what was once a phyical adapter now only appears to be a physical adapter to an ESXi host. It is actually virtual. Are there any good guides or references for answering these questions?
