NIOC - Network IO Control with 10GB NIC

[Darrell687]

We have a Dell M710HD blade with 10GB onboard NIC's (Broadcom 57712-K).  With presenting 2 x 10Gb NIC's to VMware would you trust/use Network IO Control to control the amount of bandwidth for management, vMotion, and the VM Networks with them sharing the single 10Gb NIC?  Storage will be done with a mezzanine card in a different fabric.

I read the whitepaper, but I wanted to check if anyone is using this in the field and if so how well does it work?  I would imagine this consumes more cpu cycles than using hardware partioning if the network card supported it (NPAR/Flex fabric).

Thanks

Darrell

[BrendanMarmont]

Darrell, we are going to move to v5 and will be utilising a similar spec environment, I'm interested to know how you sliced the 2x10GB nics up.

Cheers

Brendan

[arturka]

Hi Darrell

O yes, if you have 10Gigi NIC you definately should use Virtual distributed switches (vDS) with NIOC enabled and network prioritization.

Notice that you need enterprice + license.

For network balancing use LBT policy

Cheers
Artur

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