Traffic Shaping to cap bandwidth usage

[Garrett_M_]

Hi all, I have a question about port groups and traffice shaping.

Say I have a 10gb uplink on my esx server for use by VMs and the server will be hosting 10 VMs. I would like to cap the bandwidth usage of each VM to 1gb. If I understand the VMware networking concepts correctly to do this I would create a vSwitch and assign the 10gb uplink to it. Then I would create a port group and set the average, peak and burst setting to 1gb. As I deploy each VM I would assign the the port group to the virtual nic in the VM. Each VM would then receive the 1gb traffic shaping settings. Is that right?

I was a little unsure as to whether the port group is just supplying the settings for each virtual nic port assigned to the port group or if the port group traffic shaping parameter represented the total amount of bandwidth available to VMs assigned to the port group.

If the port group is just supplying the settings for each virtual nic port then each VM would be capped at 1gb. Otherwise, I suppose if the port group traffic shaping parameter represented the total bandwidth availabe to VMs assinged to the port group, I would need to create a port group for each VM that I wanted to cap at 1gb. 10 VMs and 10 port groups at 1gb each.... that doesn't seem right.

Anyone have insight into this?

Thanks,

Garrett

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

If the port group is just supplying the settings for each virtual nic port then each VM would be capped at 1gb. Otherwise, I suppose if the port group traffic shaping parameter represented the total bandwidth availabe to VMs assinged to the port group, I would need to create a port group for each VM that I wanted to cap at 1gb. 10 VMs and 10 port groups at 1gb each.... that doesn't seem right.

The port grou is supplying cap to each virtual NIC - so each VMs out bound traffic will be capped at 1 GB - but also remember if you add another port group to this virtual switch those vms network traffic will not be bound by the settings of applied to this port group -

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[Garrett_M_]

Thank you... that answered my question.

Garrett