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VMware vSphere Network I/O Control (NIOC)
VMware vSphere Network I/O Control (NIOC) is a feature that allows an administrator to prioritize bandwidth for different network resource pools on a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS).



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When enabled, Network NIOC categorizes traffic into network resource pools, which use resource allocation policies to control bandwidth for various traffic types. By default, a shares value of 50 is given to each pool, except for VM traffic, which gets a default of 100. The administrator can adjust the shares value to each pool to determine how much bandwidth a pool gets to fulfill specific service levels. Pools with a higher shares number receive more physical network resources.
NIOC resource pools include:
- fault tolerance traffic
- iSCSI traffic
- vMotion traffic
- management traffic
- vSphere Replication traffic
- network file system (NFS) traffic
- virtual machine (VM) traffic
- host-based replication (HBR) traffic
- User-defined traffic
Network NIOC was first introduced with vSphere 4.1.
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